David Leonhardt is a morning person. He feels freshest writing when the sun is rising and often goes to a coffee shop in Bethesda, where he’s lived for more than 15 years, to work on The Morning, The New York Times’ flagship daily newsletter that he runs. 

A prolific writer, avid reader and deep thinker, Leonhardt has a talent for deconstructing complicated—and occasionally dry—issues and turning them into digestible and entertaining stories for a wide audience.  

“I love being a journalist, but I constantly try to put myself in readers’ shoes,” he says. “What I try to do is say, ‘What are the things that people find confusing in the news? What are things that are more important than the attention they’re receiving?’ I try to think of myself as a representative of readers.” 

Leonhardt loves using multiple methods to illustrate points in a story. Take, for example, his article on “How Peer Pressure Affects Voting” that ran in The Morning on March 22, one of two days Bethesda Magazine interviewed him that month. Typical of a piece in the newsletter, it is conversational in tone, uses infographics, and quotes an array of outside-the-Beltway sources rather than just the usual boldface names.  

“Many Democrats have imagined people of color to be a uniform, loyal, progressive group, defined by their race,” Leonhardt wrote. “They are not. The party will have a better chance to win their votes if it spends more time listening to what these voters believe.” 

It was simply put, with facts and stats to back up his take and a takeaway that leaves no ambiguity. That approach has worked for Leonhardt since he joined the Times a quarter-century ago.  

His success was reinforced when he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011. The committee cited “his graceful penetration of America’s complicated economic questions.” Yet Leonhardt is just as comfortable talking Walt Whitman High School sports (he’s a big fan of the Bethesda school’s teams) as he is stagflation or the gold standard. That lack of pretension shines through in his writing and has brought him to the loftiest heights in American journalism.  

Bethesda Magazine spoke with Leonhardt via Zoom and phone in March. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

What’s the goal of The Morning? 

I spend a lot of time thinking about that. I think we have a few goals, and they’re connected. The Morning is free. You don’t need to have a New York Times subscription to get it. Most of our readers do not have a subscription. There are two important things to know about people who don’t have a New York Times subscription: One, they can’t click a lot of the links that we put in, and two, on average they probably follow the news a little bit less closely than someone who does have a subscription. That actually fits quite nicely with another kind of theory that I have for the newsletter, which is I think there are a lot of readers out there who are really smart and really interested in the news but are frustrated that the journalism they read sometimes feels like it’s written for experts. It uses too much jargon. It assumes that you have background knowledge about a story. It places too much emphasis on whatever happened yesterday as opposed to trying to put things in a larger context. I think most readers want to have a sense of where the story is headed. So we really try to write for those kinds of readers. When I think about our audience, I think about a very smart person who has very little background knowledge on any given story. 

Do you remember the biggest story that you covered as editor-in-chief for the Yale Daily News? 

There were two. We did a bunch of investigations about allegations of sexual harassment of students by professors. Those stories were really hard to do for obvious reasons. They involved trauma for people…. We also had a presidential search at Yale while I was there. They spent a whole year looking for a new president, and we thought we had gotten the scoop on who the new president was going to be. But the sources were anonymous. We were printed by the New Haven Register. Of course, their print run was a lot larger than ours, so it started well before ours. So when we got to the Register that night, we were able to get a copy coming off the presses. Our first reaction was excitement because they didn’t have the story. And our second reaction was a low-level terror. What if we had it wrong? We didn’t have it wrong. We had it right. Getting it a day early isn’t important in some larger social sense, but it’s part of the thrill of journalism. You’re trying to get information that people don’t want you to have.  

When you first came to Washington as a Post intern in 1994, what was the biggest adjustment for a kid from New York? 

I loved it from the get-go. I found Washington really exciting because I was, and am still, interested in politics. I also liked that Washington has an intimacy to it that New York doesn’t. It’s such a smaller city. In some ways, it’s so much more accessible. New York is maybe the most dynamic city in the world, but it’s not that livable. A lot of places are extremely livable, but they don’t have anywhere near the food—which is really important to me—or the culture that this area does. 

You joined the Times in ’99. How was being a reporter back then different than it is now? Or should I say, are there any similarities from back then to now? 

It’s a great point. The basics of the job are the same. We try to figure out information and explain it. We’re basically the readers’ representative out there, right? That hasn’t changed.  

Obviously, the internet is the biggest difference. Now at the Times we don’t write things the way we used to, which [was] the sort of reverse pyramid style. We don’t write headlines that have to fit in particular [spaces]. We try to be much more conversational with people.  

I do still love the similarities. One of the things I love about The Morning is that it comes out once a day. So like the newspaper, but unlike a lot of digital coverage, we’re not trying to publish 30 different stories on what happened in the stock market or in Gaza or Ukraine today. We’re trying to tell you the most important things that you need to know.  

You won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011. How were you informed that you won?  

The way it works is the ceremony is on a Monday, but they make the decision on [the previous] Friday. And I don’t know if this is just the big papers that have connections with Columbia University, but they figure out a way to give people a heads-up on Friday. I had known I was afinalist, and actually it was my second straight year of being a finalist. The previous year my direct boss, the business editor, had called me that Friday to say I hadn’t won. 

I had gotten it in my mind this next year that I wasn’t going to win either. So I was expecting that call from my boss again. My cellphone rings and it’s Bill Keller, who [was] the top editor. He said, ‘Hi, David. It’s Bill.’ I got this sort of jolt of adrenaline hearing his voice because I knew that the boss called people [who won the Pulitzer]. Lots was going through my mind. This could be a pity call still. I walked into a hallway in the Washington bureau of the Times and I nervously said, ‘Oh, hi, Bill. How are you?’ He said, ‘I’m not as good as you are, because you just won the Pulitzer.’ And then [my family and I] celebrated by having pizza at [Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza] on Wisconsin Avenue.  

Is it hard to implement change at the Times? From an outsider’s perspective, I imagine that there are a lot of egos and internal politics among the other business concerns that you’re talking about. 

Yes. It is hard, but I’m confident that it is hard to implement change in almost any large, highly successful organization. Because it should be hard to implement change, in some ways, because there’s a reason why these organizations have been so successful, and you don’t want to be undermining them.  

What I have found repeatedly in my career is the best way to make change happen here is to start something new and have it be different. I’ve now done that multiple times. When I became a business columnist in 2006, I wasn’t taking over a column from someone else. It was a brand-new column that the business editor started. He wanted more conversational, easy-to-follow coverage of economics. He didn’t go to the people who are already doing it and say, ‘You all need to change what you’re doing.’ 

And then in 2014, a team of people and I created The Upshot, where we found new ways to [tell stories]. You didn’t have to have a chart to go with an article; you could just make an article that was a chart. We wrote headlines in more conversational ways back when that was innovative. We published stories at 9 a.m. because that’s when most people are online, rather than at 6 p.m. because that allows them to go into the print newspaper.  

The Morning is the third example. When you do new stuff, some of it works, some of it doesn’t. If you go back and look at the early Mornings, a bunch of the stuff we did didn’t work, so we stopped doing it. But a lot does work. It actually can be easier to change the place in a bottom-up way rather than a top-down way. 

We live in such a fractured country politically, and many people get their news from partisan sources. How does that impact your work at the Times, which traditionally has been seen—fair or not—as a liberal outlet? 

I think it’s really vital for us to be independent—and not just in a partisan sense. I actually don’t think we struggle with that. The New York Times has broken more stories that have done career damage to Democrats, in part because most politicians around New York are Democrats. So whether it’s [former New York governors] Andrew Cuomo or Eliot Spitzer, I don’t think we have a problem covering tough news about Democrats. In fact, a lot of readers thought that we over-covered Hillary Clinton’s emails, for example.  

I think where it can be harder, if you just think about our demographics, most of us working at The New York Times are college graduates who live in the major metropolitan areas of New York, Washington or a handful of other cities. Those are people who are living in overwhelmingly liberal milieus. So I do think it’s really important that we be particularly rigorous about interrogating assumptions that might come from liberal America, given that many of us spend more time surrounded by liberal America than conservative America.  

I view that as a crucial part of what The Morning does. We got a fair amount of attention for raising real questions about whether COVID precautions were going too far and whether it was harming kids to be out of school for so long. More recently, my colleague German Lopez wrote pieces saying crime is really rising. I think a lot of liberals were trying to claim, ‘No, no, it’s all just a Fox News claim.’ But no, crime was really rising. And so we wrote that. And I’ve written some pieces recently that have explained how the Biden administration’s policies have contributed to the surge in migration at the border.  

We’ve also written tough pieces about conservatives. So we do it both ways, but I think it’s particularly important to make sure that we are asking tough questions about liberal assumptions.  

The Times ended 2023 with 9.7 million digital-only subscribers. Based on my unscientific conversations with colleagues and friends, as many people get it for the recipes and the games as political coverage. Is that something you envisioned happening? 

I think it’s great, and I actually think it is in keeping with newspapers’ histories. Journalists like to think that the heyday of local newspapers was about coverage of city hall, but really it was mostly about coverage of local sports teams, obituaries, comics and classified ads.  

Yes, people want to be informed. If all they wanted was games, there are many places they could find games. But they also want to be delighted and entertained, and they want highly useful information, like the kind of information that our great cooking staff gives people. We actually think it is very much in keeping with The New York Times’ history, when you think about our crossword puzzle back in the print newspaper, when you think about how popular our print recipes were, when you think about how popular our bridge column used to be.  

Are you a Wordle or Spelling Bee player?  

I am a daily Spelling Bee player. Very, very satisfying to get the pangram. And I play most of the other games a little bit less regularly, including Wordle and Connections. My wife and I do Spelling Bee together, usually in the morning with a cup of coffee. I am satisfied when we get to genius, but she’s better at it than I am. On the rare day where we get to genius without the pangram, her attitude is we haven’t solved it.  

Are you concerned with the state of journalism when it comes to local news? 

I am concerned with the state of local news. I’m lucky that I live in the rare metropolitan area where a national news source is also a local news source, which is The Washington Post. One of the things I read every day is the Washington Post sports section. I read Bethesda Magazine. I read Washingtonian magazine.  

The New York Times has a business model at this point that looks pretty solid. And even if we were to do a bad job over the next 20 years, the idea that there’s a national audience of people who want high-quality news, that’s now been proven.  

There isn’t a model for local journalism at this point, and I am deeply worried about it because democracy functions much better when we have journalists covering local school boards and local government and local companies. Political scientists have shown that when local newspapers leave, corruption goes up, polarization goes up, voter turnout appears to go down.  

I’m glad to see, though, that there seems to be a lot of energy around trying to find new models, like nonprofit news sources like The Baltimore Banner. So I’m a little bit hopeful, but it’s a huge problem. 

You’ve worked for the Times for 25 years, and you’ve seen dramatic change at your publication and in the industry. Do you care to hazard a guess on what the state of journalism will be at the Times and elsewhere 25 years from now? 

I would guess that 25 years from now The New York Times will be very strong. I would guess we would have substantially more digital subscribers than we now have. I would guess that the technology will make some leap that we can’t even fully fathom right now. So maybe it won’t be on our phone. Maybe it’ll be the kind of holograms people imagined where you’ll have a ring that basically projects something onto the table where you’re sitting. I have no idea. And although it’ll make me very sad because I love print, I would guess that there will not be a daily print newspaper in 25 years. As a journalist, actually, that doesn’t bother me because what I care about is that people are reading what I’m doing, not where they’re doing it. But as a reader, I still love print because print never runs out of battery. You can’t have alerts pop up and distract you with print.  

You mentioned that restaurants were important to you. What are some of your favorites in our area?  

Oh, I love this question. I love Vace for takeout pizza. We spend a lot of time eating Chinese food in Rockville. Sichuan Jin River in Rockville. We love Olazzo in Bethesda. We love food.  

This story appears in the July/August edition of Bethesda Magazine.

The post Bethesda Interview: Meet David Leonhardt of The New York Times appeared first on MoCo360.

Opening Day is sacred for those who worship at the altar of baseball, and Eve Rosenbaum has been a true believer her entire life. As a girl growing up in Bethesda, her parents would take her out of school every year to see her beloved Baltimore Orioles begin the long season. 

 “I remember my first-grade teacher [at Carderock Springs] was a big baseball fan,” Rosenbaum says. “When my parents came in to pick me up the principal buzzes down over the intercom and was like, ‘Eve’s parents are here to pick her up.’ And [my teacher] was like, ‘Can I come?’ ”

Today, Rosenbaum, 34, is assistant general manager for those same Orioles, and she’s played a key role in their revival. The team she joined in 2019 as director of baseball operations is coming off a monumental season in which it won its first American League East Division title in nine years. It’s been a remarkable rise for the O’s, who were among the worst teams in baseball for the previous half decade, and Rosenbaum, who in 2022 was promoted to her current position, making her one of Major League Baseball’s highest-ranking female executives.

Thirty-seven days before the team’s March 28 opener, Rosenbaum is sitting in her office at the O’s spring training facility in Sarasota, Florida, speaking to a reporter on Zoom. There’s an air not just of optimism, which is ubiquitous in the baseball world this time of year, but of confidence in her voice.

“For the last few years, when we’d come into camp it was kind of like, ‘Who’s going to be on the team this year?’ ” she says. “We would have no idea. And now we have this young core that’s been together for a long time, and we have veterans. The team is well respected and established across the league. So I feel like it’s this more natural progression of, ‘Here we go.’ ”

Rosenbaum has been charging ahead her entire life. She grew up in a family that loved baseball and started her career playing with and against boys in BCC Baseball, a local league. At Walt Whitman High School she switched to softball and excelled as a catcher—and a student. She was president of the Student Government Association and had the resume and chops to be admitted to Harvard after graduation in 2008. 

In Cambridge she walked on to the softball team and played for four years, helping the Crimson capture two Ivy League titles. Winning seems to follow Rosenbaum. Two years after joining the Houston Astros, she was the team’s international scouting manager when they won the World Series. When she followed current Orioles general manager Mike Elias from Houston to Baltimore in 2019, the Orioles were in the midst of a slow and painful rebuilding process. Her work has contributed to a stunning turnaround. The team has MLB’s No. 1 ranked minor league system according to Baseball America, and last year tied for the fourth most wins in a single season in franchise history. 

“She is one of the bright young baseball minds in the league today,” Elias told MASN.com when he promoted Rosenbaum. “She has experience across basically every department…she knows the draft, she knows player development very well, she knows analytics very well and kind of the intersection of all those areas.”

Although she lives in Baltimore now, she often comes back to Bethesda, where her parents and many friends still live. Who knows where her next home will be? If her career trajectory continues on its current path, she could become baseball’s second-ever female general manager. But for now, her focus is on helping the Orioles win their first World Series in more than 40 years.

“We won 101 games last year, but we were knocked out of the playoffs,” she says. “It’s not satisfying enough. The job’s not done.”

Bethesda Magazine spoke with Rosenbaum via Zoom in February. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.  

I know it’s hard to separate being a fan from your job, but how fun was last year?

The style of baseball that we played last year was genuinely exciting. I was on the edge of my seat so often because we had so many great late-inning comebacks, or it came down to the last pitch with [closer] Félix [Bautista] on the mound. It can be a little bit stress-inducing if you work for the team, but it was a very fun style of baseball. There was not a boring moment.

When did your love affair with baseball start?

It started before I can even remember. My parents tell me that I knew how to throw a ball before I knew how to walk. So really, it’s been my entire life. 

What, if anything, do you remember about playing baseball as a kid in BCC Baseball?

I still have some of my jerseys, because for a long time we were the Orioles. So everyone used to fight over being No. 8 [Cal Ripken Jr.’s number]. I still have my No. 8 jersey. It’s tattered and the letters are falling off, but I still have it. I just loved playing. I was a catcher when I played at Harvard, and that goes back to when I was in BCC. I think it was third grade when they switched to kid pitch, and I remember the very first game our coach was assigning us positions. I was randomly assigned to be catcher for the first game. My dad was a catcher, so he was like, ‘All right, this is it. We’re a catcher now.’ I was randomly assigned to be a catcher, and then I was a catcher at Harvard, so there’s all these ways that BCC influenced the rest of my life.

Were the Orioles always your favorite team?

They were, yeah. We had season tickets to the Orioles, so we would drive up from Bethesda to Baltimore all the time. I mean, we must have gone to 60 games a year when I was growing up. 

Who was your favorite player?

Definitely Cal. Cal was everyone’s favorite player growing up. I went to Cal Ripken Sr.’s baseball camp, and I went to a camp that Junior did as well. I was at the game when he broke the streak [for most consecutive games played in baseball history].

What were some of the highlights of your softball career at Whitman?

High school was like the peak of my career because that’s when I was good compared to everyone else. When you get to college, it’s a different story. When I got to Whitman, I had stopped growing and all of the boys were growing, so my choices were to go out for the boys’ baseball team and probably play JV or to play varsity softball, where I’d be the starting catcher. So I switched to softball. I just immediately loved it. I loved my teammates, I loved the fast pace of the game, I loved being able to call my own pitches. I remember how good some of the other teams in Montgomery County were. Poolesville and Damascus were really good. I thought I was good and then we’d go play Damascus and they would kick our butts. It was really eye-opening.

What about during your four years playing catcher at Harvard?

We won the Ivy League championship in my junior and senior years. I think any athlete can tell you winning a game is hard. Winning a championship is harder. Winning back-to-back championships is super hard—even though the [NFL’s Kansas City] Chiefs make it look easy. That was an incredible accomplishment. My senior year, we went to the NCAA Tournament, and we beat the University of Maryland. Being an Ivy League team and winning games in the tournament, it’s the same as in basketball.

Did you always have your eye on a career in professional sports?

I think both yes and no. Honestly, I think it was maybe a teacher at Whitman who came up to me and said something like, ‘You’d be really good working in sports’ because I was such a sports fanatic. A lot of people who work in sports now did love sports growing up. But beyond just being a fan, I always got to see how the games impacted the communities off the field and how it would bring people together. I mean, people don’t agree on anything these days, but a whole city or whole state can root for a team and live and die on the roster moves and the outcomes of games. Going to school in Boston, it’s in a state that’s really in love with its sports teams. So in college I said, ‘OK, I want to try my hand at the strategy side of this, at the business side of this.’ 

How’d you break into the business? 

After my sophomore year in college, I got an internship with the Red Sox. I worked in Fenway Affairs, which dealt with local government and local business affairs around Fenway Park. Then the next summer, I got an internship with Major League Baseball in their baseball operations department. Then I got a job with the NFL.

What did you do for the NFL?

I did a program called the Junior Rotational Program, which is like their executive training program. It’s right after you graduate from college. It was four six-month stints in different departments around the Commissioner’s Office, which for me was great because I knew I wanted to be in sports, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I got to see how the most successful league in the country ran their business. Out of that I was hired to be a manager of business intelligence and optimization for NFL Media.

Why did you make the switch to baseball?

Baseball has always been my favorite sport. I was happy doing what I was doing. I was in my early 20s, I was living in New York City, but I went back and forth between L.A. and New York. And then one of the guys who I interned for at Major League Baseball came to me one day and said, ‘Hey, Eve, I remember you from your internship. I remember that you were a really good worker and that you loved baseball. I’m the international scouting director for the Houston Astros right now, and I need some help. Do you want to come work for me?’ I figured this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break into baseball operations and scouting. So I did it.

You met Orioles general manager Mike Elias in Houston. What first struck you about him?

This is funny. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this to anyone. The first thought I’ll always think about for Mike was his office was right behind where my first desk was. He was the amateur 

scouting director, so he was always on the road. He was never there. So everyone used his office as a phone booth. If he was there everyone would be like, ‘Oh, what do we do now?’ 

He was always working. He was just enmeshed in the amateur scouting world. The guy’s a super hard worker and super knowledgeable.

You were in Houston when they won the World Series in 2017. How do you think about that title looking back on it now knowing the sign stealing scandal that surrounded it?

I don’t know. There’s not a great answer to that. What I like to focus on is that the team then followed it up with another World Series [title] in 2022 with a lot of the same players. And the team’s been really good ever since. I’ve heard all sorts of opinions about it, and they’re all valid things for people to feel and say. Regardless of that, I take a lot of pride in the Astros the last few years because a lot of the young international players who I helped sign when I was there have been key parts of that team. So that’s what I like to focus on…the players who I saw go from being 15 years old to be a 2022 world champion.

What does your role as assistant general manager with the Orioles entail?

My main job is to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Major League team. A lot of that is roster management and the daily transactions of optioning guys between AAA and the majors. Discussing with the medical staff if someone needs to go on the Injured List or a rehab assignment. Working with our pitching coaches to map out which relievers are available for that night and what our starting rotation is going to be for the next week or two. 

Then there’s the bigger picture items for the Major League roster, like free agent signings and trades, which we spent all off-season working on. Waiver claims, smaller cash considerations trades. There’s a lot of player evaluation that I do on a day-to-day basis and then getting together with our little strategy team here in baseball ops and discussing what moves we want to make. 

I touch all facets of the baseball operations department: player development, minor league operations, strength and conditioning, performance, analytics. 

Is there one specific attribute you’re looking for in a player, a skill that a player has that makes them a quintessential Oriole?

I don’t know if I can [distill] this down into one particular trait, but we look at players who we think are going to fit our particular roster. We put a big focus on that. Based on this player’s skill set, how is he going to fit in with the other 39 guys we have on the 40-man roster right now? We spend a lot of time focusing on our particular situation in the American League East, which is grueling. We have a really good, young, exciting core that’s going to be here for a while, so we spend a lot of time focusing on players who skill-wise will fit in with that group. And then also making sure that the player’s going to come in and be an asset in our clubhouse as well.

You’re one of the highest-ranking female executives in baseball. I’m sure people ask you about that all the time. Does that impact your job or life in any way or is it just something you have to talk about in interviews?

The answer is both yes and no. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m a woman in baseball.’ I mean, it’s true, but it’s not what I’m thinking about; what I’m thinking about is the same thing that everyone else in the building is thinking about, which is how do we improve the Orioles and how do we win on the field? How do we win today? How do we win tomorrow? How do we win next year? How do we win two years from now? That is the goal in baseball. That’s what I’m singularly focused on all the time. 

I’ve always thought that if I do my job well, go above and beyond what’s asked of me, anticipate what my boss and his boss are going to need, the rest will kind of take care of itself. I’m not so naive to think that being a woman in baseball is exactly the same as being a man. I know there’s not a lot of people who look like me in baseball. For some people it might be unusual to see someone like me at a workout. I’m 5’4”. A lot of people in baseball are a foot taller than me. They might not even see me. They might just walk right past, but that’s OK. You just keep plugging away and eventually people get used to it. So it’s something that I’m aware of, but it’s not something that I think about every day because I’m just focused on the team.

You were inducted into the Greater Washington Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2021. I’m sure there are a lot of ways you could have responded when you got that call, ranging from, ‘What’s that?’ to ‘I grew up dreaming of this.’ How did you react?

When they called me to tell me that I was nominated they prefaced it by saying, ‘Not a lot of people get in the first year that they’re nominated, so you might not get in this year.’ So I didn’t think anything of it. Then they called back a few months later and told me that I was in. It was like the best day of my parents’ life. 

I knew about the JCC [Bender Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville]. We were not members growing up, but they had a pool and a gym and indoor basketball court. It was a cool place to go with friends who were members. I did not realize that they had a sports hall of fame. When I learned about it I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the most incredible thing.’ Because the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame that they have there is all about raising money for the summer camp program that they do at the JCC. And the summer camp program is something that everyone in Bethesda and Rockville knows about. It’s a normal day camp for kids, except that they also accept all sorts of kids with physical and mental disabilities. And the money that comes in through the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame helps ensure that those families with the kids who have special needs don’t pay a cent more in order to go to that camp. And that is really the meaning behind the Hall of Fame. I don’t know how many Hall of Fames can say that they serve such a great cause.

Do you get back to Bethesda a lot?

When I go to downtown Bethesda now it’s totally different. When I was growing up, we used to go hang out at the Barnes & Noble. It was the place to be. Now it’s Anthropologie. I still love going back to [Westfield] Montgomery mall. That has changed as well, but Montgomery mall has always had a really good food court. There’s a little place called The Market on the Boulevard [in Cabin John]. Anytime I go to Bethesda, I usually stop there on my way home and pick up dinner. Bethesda is just a great, great, great place to grow up.

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.

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Audie Cornish sits in her office at CNN’s Washington, D.C., bureau, reflecting. In a few hours she’ll appear on Inside Politics to share her thoughts on a recent Supreme Court ruling with a national television audience. 

It’s a typically busy morning. After that TV spot, Cornish is planning to edit a rare episode of her podcast with a celebrity guest, the writer and comedian Larry Wilmore.  

“That’s frequently my day: hair and makeup. TV hit. Pod recording, pod interview, writing, then TV again,” she says. “It’s actually a cool mix.”

Cornish, a 44-year-old Takoma Park resident, has a voice for radio, a face for TV, and a brain for everything. First nationally at NPR as co-host of All Things Considered and now at CNN, where she hosts the podcast The Assignment and appears on shows including The Lead, CNN Tonight and AC360, Cornish has contextualized the most important political, social and cultural stories of our time, always with the same person in mind: you. It’s an approach that has made her one of America’s most revered journalists. 

She’s come a long way from her first job as a cub reporter for the Associated Press in Boston. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Cornish grew up in Randolph, Massachusetts, about 30 minutes south of Boston. Over the course of her career she’s covered everything from September 11 to January 6 and interviewed everyone from professors to presidents. 

Cornish surprised some observers when she left NPR in 2022 to join CNN+, the network’s ill-fated streaming service. It hasn’t been all smooth sailing. A blockbuster article detailing problems at the network came out in The Atlantic last June, describing Cornish as having “quizzed” then-CEO Chris Licht during a Q&A session on the “culture and morale” of the company and the confusion over his plans. Five days later, Licht departed from the network, but Cornish has stayed—and is thriving. The Assignment was named “Best Interview Podcast” at the 2023 Ambies Awards. In October, it began dropping two episodes per week.

We spoke with Cornish in her office. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

It’s a little unnerving to interview someone who interviews people for a living, so I thought I’d start by asking you how you like to begin an interview when you’re asking the questions, not answering them. 

That’s a good question. It’s changed over time. Right now I start by trying to make the person feel comfortable. Asking them a very casual question about themselves or a question that will better help me understand how they started doing the thing they do. You’d be surprised; I think a lot of times in interviews everyone’s like, “OK, we know who we are, so let’s just start.” Whereas I like to say, “Introduce yourself the way you like to be introduced.” You often learn that people may think of themselves as [doing] one kind of job, but really they actually believe themselves to have another kind of identity. I call that time teaching each other what the interview will be like. They learn that I’m going to interrupt them. We learn from each other what our dialogue will be like in those first few minutes. Really establishing the ground rules in the most comfortable way possible. I don’t pretend we’re friends having a conversation that happened to be taped. I feel strongly that an interview is a piece of journalism, and everyone should be aware of the ground rules.  

When did you become interested in journalism?

I came to journalism through practicing journalism, meaning I didn’t take a newswriting and reporting class—that wasn’t the first way I understood the work. I started working for the college radio station, and we just started doing stories right away. So I got this very hands-on experience in doing it. I think that had a profound effect on how I saw it as a profession or as a calling, because I experienced it in a very visceral way, very early.

You also interned at NPR while you were in college. Was there something about radio in particular that attracted you?  

It just happened to be the thing. It’s really cool, which is why so many people got into podcasting. It has a low bar of entry and a high bar of mastery. It’s kind of like golf in that way. Once people start doing it, they get really into it. It’s all in your hands. There’s not a camera guy, a light guy, a whole other infrastructure. It’s you, your microphone, your notebook and just going out into the world and convincing people to talk to you in a very intimate way. It’s a very rich reporting experience and I think I got addicted to it. 

Did you cover the 9/11 attacks?

I was [at the Associated Press], but I was literally three months out of college, so they were not exactly like, “Hey, kid, go to the airport.” What I ended up doing were all the stories that weren’t getting done because the other reporters were poring over police reports out of Logan Airport. So I was covering small elections that were continuing. I remember covering Stephen Lynch, who’s still in Congress. I went to a ton of memorials. And so it was another moment that introduces you to journalism as a calling, meaning: Are you going to go in the direction of the disaster and the first responders? You don’t have any of the stuff the first responders have. You have no gear; people don’t value you the same way. But you’re going in that direction because you’re telling the story. Or are you going to say, This is not for me? That is a good inflection moment for every journalist to have. … I covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a lot of people who had lost their loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and I just felt like there’s a way to do that that feels very vampiric—the bad part of how people think about journalism, kind of picking over people’s pain—but there also is a way to do it that is going to someone and saying, “I want you to share the memory of your loved one so people don’t forget what happened here.” I’ve found that people respond to that. 

How did you land your first job at NPR?

I worked in Boston for several years covering a lot of national stories, including presidential races. Then a job opened up to be the Southern bureau correspondent. I had been a Massachusetts girl my whole life. I really felt like I needed to leave. So I went to the South. It was the best thing I ever did, and it was the hardest thing I ever did. I was super homesick, I was 25, I had just gotten married, and all of a sudden I was going down to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, which was still in horrendous condition [from Hurricane Katrina].

Where did you live?

I went to Nashville. That was my base, but I would go all over the South. I spent a lot of time in western Tennessee, Memphis, Mississippi, South Carolina, Birmingham, northern Georgia. For someone who had come from a really parochial background, it was incredibly eye-opening.

In what way? What did you learn about the fabric of the country during that time?

I don’t think you can understand America without understanding the South and how the South has processed America’s history. I covered a lot of politics down there, and politics is such an interesting way of meeting and understanding [people], because if you do it right, you’re quite literally asking, “What do you believe and why do you believe it?” That’s such a profound question to engage in on a street corner or in a diner. It was this de Tocqueville experience of a different part of the country.

What makes NPR a unique place to be a journalist? 

Time. The length of stories and the depth is really unmatched. It’s really only print magazines that take that same kind of time profiling someone or understanding someone.

You’ve also interviewed the boldest of bold names (such as Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen). How do you prepare for an interview with someone who’s been interviewed a million times?

Panic. Fear. Internal second-guessing. I read a lot in order to figure out what not to ask. And I read sometimes to understand how to best structure a question. I’m very interested in the architecture of a question. There are certain questions that need to be a yes or no question, depending on the person. There are certain questions that absolutely cannot be yes or no. There are certain questions, especially with politicians, where you want to get to their talking point before they do so that they have nothing else to do but think. So I’ve become a real student of how people ask questions. 

So now you’re at CNN during what is certainly an interesting time to be there. When you read the Atlantic piece, were you surprised to see your name in it?

I would say everyone was surprised in general. 

What was the level of knowledge among people working here about the story?

A lot. I don’t speak to press off the record, so I was not participating. I think that whole experience was the culmination of many months of work, both by the writer, Tim Alberta, but also in the experience it was portraying. By the time it reached that point, a lot had gone on here. I’ve been introduced to corporate media in a very fascinating time.

Let’s talk about The Assignment. Where did the idea for the podcast come from?

I’m not sure (laughs). I knew I wanted it to be an interview show, and I knew I didn’t want to compete with famous people interviewing other famous people. And then I thought, All the stories I had done at NPR that I really enjoyed involved groups. I remember doing this series on faith and politics where we would gather together a room full of Catholics, a room full of Muslims…disparate voices from within those communities. They would talk about how their faith had informed their understanding of American politics. And over and over again I would look back on experiences where I realized I had had the most fun in a room full of people, and I wanted to re-create that feeling. We have this tip line where people can call in and send us story ideas, and I go through and listen, and everyone starts, “Hi, Audie,” like they’re talking directly to me. Coming from NPR, I didn’t have that. There’s something about podcasting where people feel really connected to you. 

You feature such a wide array of topics. Back-to-back podcasts (in June) discussed Roe v. Wade a year after it was overturned and tipping in restaurants. What are you looking for in a topic?

I start with people. I have my guide here (points to a dry-erase board hanging on her office wall). Who has a unique perspective? Can they share it? How does it illuminate a specific angle of the story? The other metric we have is zeitgeist. You just have to have your antenna up in a way that I think journalists are very good at. It’s my job to go out and hear what people are talking about. I think that’s different from gatekeeping, which is how people have come to criticize journalism. What I’m doing now is really helping people sort through information and surfacing the things that will help inform them in ways that they can make decisions about their lives. 

Working in journalism, how do you avoid becoming cynical?

I don’t. I have cynical days all the time. I also have little kids, and I don’t want to look at them and say, “The world is torched. Here’s a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” As corny as it is, I want them to understand that they are not passive travelers in the world. But I’m cynical all the time. Especially covering politics. There are sometimes where I’m like, I can’t be on air because I have nothing to say here that will sound positive, and I don’t want to be a barstool cynic. That’s not helpful to anyone. 

What’s it like being married to a fellow reporter?

It’s awesome. We talk about the news every day. We still get papers. There are magazines everywhere. Our kids like to write books because Daddy’s a book editor. What it means is that you’re constantly engaged in ideas. New ideas keep you young. 

Why do you choose to make Takoma Park your home?

I have to be honest. My husband has become a Takoma Park cultist. It’s a thing. When I came to Washington, I was like, Capitol Hill looks cool, Petworth looks cool. We lived in Takoma Park for a little bit in an apartment, and after that he was done. Maybe it reminds us of Massachusetts—it’s walkable, the Metro system is right there. I think in some ways it felt familiar to us. There’s a strong faith community. It’s very civic-minded. I’m putting this on him in print: I know we can never leave because he loves it so much.

What are a few of your favorite spots in Montgomery County?

Wheaton Regional Park is the bomb. My kids love it. The carousel, the train. I pretend it’s a hidden gem, but everyone knows about it and it’s fantastic. I love to go to Brookside Gardens and walk around. Those are the moments when I’m like, I guess I don’t mind the taxes, because Montgomery County’s got it all. I love Kaldi’s Social House, which is a coffee place in Silver Spring. There’s a little place called The Girl & The Vine, which I always shout to the rooftops. We like Quarry [House] Tavern. That’s our dive bar. After the last White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we went there in our formal clothes and had burgers and tater tots. What I like about all of this is everyone has a real respect for the community. There’s a sense that they want to do something that will become part of the landscape of the place. I think that’s really sweet. 

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.

This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Forty-six hours before his football team kicks off a new era, one that its fans hope will erase a quarter century of miserable memories, Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris—a lifelong fan himself—is sitting in a room on the third floor of Planet Word, the downtown D.C. museum dedicated to language. Hundreds of words, stacked 22 feet high, cover one of the walls. Among them: belief.

A native of Chevy Chase, the 58-year-old Harris is a former wrestler who has always believed in the power of sports to unite, which is why he pivoted to the world of sports after making a fortune in business. In 2011, he bought the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, and his sports and entertainment company has gone on to add the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, part of the British soccer club Crystal Palace, and a host of other venues and smaller teams to a portfolio that also includes the NFL’s Commanders, which he purchased in July for a record $6.05 billion.

Harris waits to walk across the street to Franklin Park for a season-opening pep rally for fans who have put their faith (another word on the wall, located right next to greedy, which has been used more than once to describe the guy Harris bought the team from) in him and his all-star ownership group of minority partners—which includes Montgomery County magnate Mitchell Rales and NBA legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson. He’s contemplating what those first moments in the FedEx Field owner’s box might mean to him. 

“I’ve owned sports teams, and this feels like a playoff game to me,” says Harris, whose Sixers and Devils have made postseason runs. “A lot of work has gone into getting the team prepared for opening day and also getting the stadium prepared. Thousands of details. I feel tremendous anticipation and excitement.”

The son of an orthodontist and a teacher, Harris attended The Field School in Washington, D.C., before earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He went on to Harvard Business School, where he met his wife, Marjorie (they have five children together), and at the age of 25 co-founded the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Forbes estimates his net worth at $6.6 billion.  

Despite all his success, Harris still yearns for competition. 

“Sports has been a triple play for me,” he says. “Being around the best athletes in the world, giving me an avenue to compete. As I get on to, let’s say, my more mature years, being able to help a city is very important to me.”

Chief among his long list of priorities is finding a new home to replace the reviled FedEx Field. Although the team spent $40 million on upgrades to the stadium before the season, remaining there is not in the long-term plan. Under former owner Dan Snyder’s reign, Maryland, Virginia and the District showed little appetite for luring the team, but now that Harris has taken over, that seems to have changed. If he’s able to turn around his beloved once-proud franchise, he will become a hero in his hometown. That’s the dream—which is one of the bigger words on the wall. 

We spent 45 minutes talking to Harris on that Friday afternoon in September before the regular-season opener. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.   

As an owner, when you watch your team play, can you just be a fan? Or do you always have a million different things running through your head?

It’s like being a fan on steroids. It’s turbocharged. I can only compare it to when I was just a fan versus now. My emotions are much greater. At the same time, you’re hosting literally thousands of people. You have to be available to a lot of different people. When you win a big game, the elation that you feel is incredible. When you lose, I get into a bad mood. What I do now, because it’s not fair to my family and other people that are close to me, I become a little more stoic. I give myself a little time to get over it. I try to not show it on the outside. When you’re at the game, obviously people are watching you, and so I feel a lot of stress. The players are playing the game so there’s not a lot you can do about it, so you need a little bit of training to keep your emotions on the inside.

Were you a big sports fan growing up?

I was all in on sports. We missed the Senators, so we would go down to Memorial Stadium and watch the Orioles. There were no Nationals. I was there when the Capitals came. We were there for the opening of the Washington Bullets in Landover at Capital Centre. But the dominant sport in Washington always was football. That was the sport that, by far, we mostly focused on. 

Do you remember your first game at RFK Stadium?

I do remember being at RFK as a really young person, walking down East Capitol Street. I remember walking in, feeling the noise, and hearing the fans roaring and cheering. I remember looking up at [then-owner] Jack Kent Cooke’s box. It was an amazing place. 

What was it about the franchise in that era that you so respected and admired? 

It was always a winning franchise. It was a uniter of Washington. I had this amazing year in 1982-83 when I saw the Red— the Commanders—I almost slipped up—beat Dallas, and then that famous John Riggins run on fourth and one [to win Super Bowl XVII]. For me, sports was always very important, and the Commanders always stood for unity and winning and values. 

You were a wrestler growing up and in college. The wrestlers I’ve known speak about the sport in almost spiritual terms. What is it about wrestlers that sets them apart?

Wrestling changed my life in terms of the discipline and intensity that it brought to who I was as a person. In wrestling, you go out on the mat and it’s you against another human being. They’re trying to drive your head into the mat and dominate you physically. There’s nowhere to hide. It’s a combat sport. There’s nothing like the experience of getting physically dominated as a learning experience to then say, ‘I didn’t like that. I don’t want that to happen again. How can I avoid that happening again?’ That’s about running and lifting and training and practicing and putting a tremendous amount of grit and tenacity into your lifestyle and who you are as a person. Wrestlers tend to over practice. They tend to constantly work, condition. No one’s ever accused me of being outworked. It pushes you to your absolute limit. You’re exerting 120 percent of your being, of your soul, to survive. There’s no one that’s going to help you but you. Life is tough, so you have to prepare and be ready for it. 

You went to the Wharton School at Penn and then on to Harvard Business School. What attracted you to the world of business?

My dad had been an orthodontist. My mom was a teacher and then a homemaker. I knew absolutely nothing about business. I went to Penn and I took an econ class and I really liked it. Then I found out there was this school called Wharton, which turned out to be the best undergraduate business school in the country. I said, Wow, maybe I should do that. I found my calling early as an investor. A lot of people are blessed with innate skills. I was blessed as an investor and a business builder. I remember senior year my dad saying, ‘You should be an accountant; that’s really the safe way to go.’ I said, ‘No way.’ I went to Wall Street. 

That was the top of the food chain in terms of where the best and the brightest people wanted to go. I went to a place called Drexel Burnham Lambert, which at that point had created the high-yield market. I went to this thing called the Financial Analyst Program, which is like a boot camp for finance where you work 100 hours a week but you learn about the most interesting deals with the smartest people. At the end of that two years, I said, ‘I’m going to apply to one school, and if I get in, I’ll go; otherwise I’m going to keep working.’ Harvard Business School let me in. I always kept shooting above. With young people I always say, ‘Shoot for the moon; shoot for the stars. Dream big. Even if you miss, you’re going to be better off.’ 

Why did you decide to get into sports?

When I look back on it now, something inside of me was very moved by sports, both in terms of my personal affinity to playing it—later in life I did marathons and triathlons, and I’m still very into fitness—but also the sort of common purpose and the shared experience that sports gives a city. Deep in my memory—I didn’t know it at the time—was this notion that sports brings people together. I had heard that the Sixers might be for sale. The Sixers hadn’t won for a long time and had lost a little bit of their way. They were losing a lot of money, and the city had gotten tired of them. I called them, and then 18 months later I led a group to buy the Philadelphia 76ers. They were between 25th and 30th in the league in terms of revenues. 

We rebuilt the Sixers and we won more than 50 games the last five seasons. We love Philly. They are sports passionate and they have supported the team, and they are constantly holding us accountable in many ways. We are a championship contending team. We haven’t quite pushed through yet, which creates frustration for everyone, most of all me. But we’re right there. We have to slay the leprechauns at some point: We have to beat the Celtics.

How involved in on-the-field/court/ice personnel decisions are you?

I believe in hiring and retaining and motivating and holding accountable the best coaching staff and front office people, and then trying to support them through organizational building. And creating edges relative to competition around the league. Obviously, players win championships. Owners don’t win championships. Player selection, game strategy, player health and safety, all that stuff is advancing scientifically very quickly. We’re on the cutting edge of everything in terms of trying to support the franchises. 

I’ve been doing a bunch of that here already in terms of looking at how we can support [head coach] Ron [Rivera], [executive vice president of football/player personnel] Marty [Hurney], [general manager] Martin [Mayhew] and their staff as to the analytics, player health, sport science. We’re starting to make some strides in our thought process. You’ll probably see some new people showing up soon. 

As far as being involved, I think on really big decisions that are millions and millions of dollars that are franchise-changing decisions, I’m of course going to be involved. On smaller decisions, I like to be briefed, I like to see how people are thinking, but I’m not going to micromanage. 

What did you find most surprising or disturbing about the way things were done with this franchise once you took over?

The franchise was in need of significant investment. In the stadium, everything from plumbing and leaks and bathrooms to sound systems, ovens. On the football side, it’s the same thing. There’s a lot of things to do here. On the sports side, it’s a tent for the players’ families, it’s Gatorade stations, it’s extra hot tubs so the players don’t have to wait for them and can get home. Dozens and dozens of small items. 

The interesting thing to me also was that the players had noticed that in their own stadium sometimes there were more opposing fans versus home fans. They said, ‘We really appreciate you being here because we think that now our stadium’s going to feel like a home field.’ That was really surprising to me. 

What do you feel your role is in terms of rehabilitating the team’s reputation in the community and within the league?

I want the team to be something that my kids can be proud of, that the city can be proud of, that fans and their kids can be proud of. That’s how I’ve tried to live my own life. I want it to stand for excellence and integrity, and so we’ve come in very quickly and sent that message. We’re asking a lot of the business staff and certainly the front office and the coaching staff and everyone. To build a championship contending team, you need to pace everything up. 

In sports, when you own a franchise, it’s very different than business. The public holds you personally accountable. There’s so much publicity that people expect you, as the managing partner, to be accountable for the organization. That’s a huge responsibility that keeps me up at night because life is complicated. Things happen. You do your absolute best, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we set this thing up so we stand for integrity, excellence, inclusion, diversity. I’m proud to say that the team and [president] Jason [Wright] have done an amazing job. Ron and his staff have an incredibly inclusive organization. We’re upping everyone’s game, but it’s a bumpy road. It’s not a straight line.

Obviously there’s been a lot of talk about a new stadium. What are a few of your favorite stadiums or arenas, and what qualities do they share?

I always start with football and winning games, because no matter what else we do, if we’re not successful at that, we’ll be judged harder. If we’re successful at that, it’s easier. I think RFK was a place where if you were coming in as an opposing team you didn’t want to be there. So it was like an extra man on offense and defense. I was talking to Troy Aikman, and he said, ‘I didn’t like to go in there.’ 

You want that, and then you want a place that’s accessible, that’s inclusive, and where the fan experience is elevated. That’s a complicated mosaic. Really big picture is creating positive economic activity for places that might need it. Building a stadium in

Newark [New Jersey], building our [Sixers] practice facility in Camden [N.J.], building where we’re attempting to build in Philly, these are all things where we’re helping thousands of people and using contractors from diverse backgrounds. We’re really focused on how do we create economic activity in the right places. The overall goal would be to do all of that. Obviously, it’s going to take some time to figure out.

Let’s talk about nicknames. I’m not going to ask you about changing the nickname, but what are the components that make up a good nickname?

Look, right now we’re really focused on football, the fan experience and engaging with the city. Right now we’re focused on avoiding distraction, and we’re all behind the Washington Commanders. 

Sports is a very zero-sum game, but in your first year, aside from wins and losses, how are you going to judge the success of the season?

Certainly everyone’s always going to judge wins and losses, and that’s the way it should be judged. We got here at training camp, so the reality of it is our ability to affect that [this year is minimal]. We think Coach Ron is a good leader, and we’re very excited about the season. The other components are going to be: Have we created engagement with the city? Have we started achieving change on the narrative? Have we started to make this team something that people are proud of? Have people started reengaging? Are there more home fans than away fans at our games even when we play the Giants? …I’m not going to mention any other teams. I don’t want to get myself into trouble (laughs). 

Do we own that noise? And then, have we improved FedEx Field? Have we started to make strides in the community in terms of helping people? Have we started to make some progress on our thought process around the next venue of the Washington Commanders?  

You and your wife, Marjorie, founded Harris Philanthropies in 2014. What’s your philosophy when it comes to philanthropy?

My grandfather was a U.S. postal worker from Philly. My other grandfather was an appliance repairman. Their parents left Eastern Europe to avoid religious persecution and came through Ellis Island. My dad and my mom went to college, the first in their families. And now here I am, and I’ve experienced tremendous success through business. I always look at it as if someone paid it forward, someone gave me the opportunity to have this, and so I look at my life as I have a finite amount of time. I’m religious. My job is to make the world a better place and impact the most people as quickly as I can. 

We’re big investors in after-school sports. Backing entrepreneurs. Basic financial literacy. Then we do health and wellness for communities in need. Education. We gave the largest gift to the [Philadelphia] Police Athletic League in history. 

It’s super exciting for me to be able to come home to the area where I grew up and be able to help people. 

Do you spend much time in Montgomery County these days?

Well, my mom still lives in Friendship Heights. I went and visited my old house in Chevy Chase. I just knocked on the door. It’s right near East West Highway and Beach [Drive]. It looks similar. I grew up in a three-bedroom house, two levels on a quarter acre. 

I just knocked on the door and they answered. We had a long discussion. It was pretty funny.

This story appears in the November/December issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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During the lockdown days of the pandemic, Amer Yaqub found himself in a pickle. Trapped at his home in Gaithersburg, he was desperate to find a physical activity that could provide some exercise and a break from the monotony of quarantine for him and his two sons. He decided to give a racket sport a try. 

If you think you know where this story is going, keep reading.  

Like millions of other bored Americans, Yaqub, 55, at one point turned to pickleball. But he found it far too slow for his liking. Although he grew up in Potomac, he was born in Pakistan and felt a connection to the heritage of his native country, which is in a region of the world where badminton is a serious sport. So he eventually bought a net, a few cheap rackets and some plastic shuttlecocks, and started playing casual games in his backyard. 

Fast forward to a Tuesday night this June, roughly three years later. Yaqub trots onto a court in the gym at Rockville’s Bauer Drive Community Recreation Center, one of 15 rec centers throughout the county that offer of free drop-in badminton. (Private clubs, such as the East Coast Badminton Club and Capital Badminton Academy, both in Gaithersburg, also offer court time for a fee.) In one hand he holds an $80 Yonex racket, in the other a sleeve of goose feather shuttlecocks.  

“I got hooked on it as a way for me to connect with my two boys,” he says. “But the minute we could play indoors was when I got a taste of the real thing.”

The recreational backyard variety of badminton has about as much in common with the world-class indoor sport as a kids’ game of Wiffle ball does with the World Series. Competitive badminton requires exquisite hand-eye coordination, physical stamina, agility and strength. (Search “Top 10 Badminton Rallies at the Olympic Games” on YouTube and prepare to be mesmerized.) It’s often called the fastest racket sport on Earth; Guinness World Records cites the fastest badminton hit in competition by a male at 264 mph. 

Its speed can be dizzying, and thus it provides a top-notch cardio workout; Yaqub has shed 18 pounds since he started playing. But he’s also gained something he wasn’t expecting: friendships. 

“It’s hard to make friends when you’re older,” he says. “But I’ve made friends who I meet [even] outside of badminton now.”

Falko Koehler, 56,  is one of them. He’s been playing since 2009, two years after he came to the U.S. from Germany. He and Yaqub often play doubles together, and they occasionally go to dinner as well. 

Mark Schneider, 42, is a Washington, D.C., native who has been playing for about a decade. He appreciates the sport for the physical effort it requires, but also for the social opportunities that it provides. 

“I like having that exposure to different cultures,” he says. “You meet a lot of folks from a lot of different parts of the world. The cultural aspect is a good way to get different viewpoints.”

Indeed, on this night—like most—it’s hard to find two people who look alike. Most players are of Asian heritage. The sport is popular in China, Indonesia, India and in pockets of Europe. Worldwide, it is played by more than 339 million people, according to the Badminton World Federation. Roughly 6.4 million of those are in the U.S. It became an Olympic sport in 1992; an American has yet to win a medal.

“It’s most popular here with ethnicities that have a cultural affinity for badminton,” says Linda French, CEO of USA Badminton. “The places it’s growing the most are a lot of the tech sector cities. All along the East Coast, there are more clubs being formed and springing up.”

Players whack the shuttlecock over the 5-foot-1-inch-high net, but they also must possess the finesse needed for pinpoint placement. One of the main attractions for Yaqub is the fact that men and women of varied ages can compete against one another even at the sport’s intermediate to advanced levels. One of the regulars at Bauer Drive is Pak-Yee Chan. A native of Malaysia, he started playing in the 1960s. He’s 82 now, lean, limber and surprisingly quick, and can hold his own against players decades younger. 

Yaqub’s son Zach is 19 years old and plays baseball at Oberlin College in Ohio. He beat his dad 61 straight times before the old man pulled out a victory. 

“When I’m playing, I’m in complete bliss. Adrenaline flows,” says Yaqub, who celebrated his victory over Zach by posting a video on TikTok. “The minute I walk [away], my feet hurt, my shoulder hurts. Cocoon is the movie where old people magically become young. That’s what badminton is for me.” 

This story appears in the September/October issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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For most people, it’s a question that requires only a one- or two-word response: What do you do for a living? For Mo Rocca, the answer is more complicated. 

Rocca has been a regular correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning for more than a decade, reporting on topics ranging from the worst president in history (James Buchanan, pretty much everyone agrees, or at least they once did) to the scourge of workplace meetings. He also hosts the television show The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, and can be heard on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! 

Let’s pause for a moment to gather our breath. 

He is the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Mobituaries, on which he recounts people and things often forgotten by history. (Marlene Dietrich; Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy; and dragons have been among the subjects of his verbal autopsies.) Its third season debuted in October as a No. 1 history series on Apple Podcasts. He’s also an author who wrote a book of Mobituaries and another on presidents and their pets. He has appeared on Broadway, was a correspondent for The Daily Show, and this year acted in a guest role on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

“Restless” might be a good word to describe Rocca, who was born at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. Words were always big in the Bethesda house where he grew up: His father, Marcel X. “Jack” Rocca, was the founder and president of Transemantics, a company based around language and education; his mother, Maria Luisa “Tini” Rocca, was the registrar at a subsidiary of that, the International Language Institute. Young Mo was obsessed with reading the World Book Encyclopedia and once started a gossip magazine with a friend at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School. He graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School and went on to major in English lit at Harvard, where he served as president of the university’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals. 

So yes, Mo Rocca has always had something to say.  

“It sounds kind of precious, but I knew that I wanted to tell stories in some capacity. I was always a news junkie. I remember seeing the movie The Killing Fields. Not a comedy,” he says of the 1984 film depicting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. “I remember thinking, Do I want to be the guy playing the character, or do I want to be the character who’s a journalist? It is a kind of a performance when you’re reporting a story. You’re trying to connect with an audience.”

Connect he has. Since starting on The Daily Show in 1998, Rocca has appealed to audiences of varied ages, cultural sensibilities and political persuasions. Perhaps that’s because he explores overlooked and underappreciated subjects, such as how bananas make their way from Central America to our breakfast tables, or the death of the station wagon. A Mo Rocca story is usually equal parts informative, entertaining and impactful, often with a dash of whimsy and a pun or two thrown in. He displayed those same characteristics during the hour we spent speaking with him in early May via Zoom from his apartment in New York City, where he’s lived for 25 years. (Now that he no longer has family living in this area, he says he doesn’t get back to visit as often as he’d like to.) The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.  

What do you like about living in New York, and what, if anything, drives you crazy about it?

The noise is starting to drive me a little crazy. But I like that in any moment I can walk out onto the street and see people and be part of something. I know there have been songs written about New York being a lonely place—it doesn’t feel that way to me.

What are some of your best memories from growing up in Bethesda? I heard you mention your fondness for Shakey’s Pizza in an interview once.

I loved Shakey’s. I loved going to Farrell’s for ice cream. My best friend growing up lived a stone’s throw away. I have great memories of playing with him and the weird things that we would do. At one point I took a crossing guard sash, and we set up a traffic stop on the corner of Kirkwood and Jordan to do a survey about what people thought about Roy Rogers restaurant. 

For a time, I went to Wood Acres Elementary, and I just loved it. I went back there to do an episode of my podcast and I interviewed my fifth grade teacher, who I loved.  

[Another memory is] doing theater for the first time with BAPA [Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts]. It was a brand-new operation run by two amazing women, Marcia Smith and Bonnie Fogel, who changed my life. Marcia had been on an actual soap opera [As the World Turns], which was impossibly exciting. …Marcia, Bonnie and BAPA [now known as Imagination Stage] taught me to love theater and to value my talent.  

I have to ask you the requisite ‘This is on your Wikipedia page, but is it true?’ question: While at
Harvard, did you play Seymour in a production of Little Shop of Horrors that co-starred Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson?

Yeah, she’s amazing. I really love her. And I was a really good Seymour.

Was she a good actor?

Yeah, and she’s a great singer. We were in the same improv troupe for two or three years. I was the lead [in Little Shop], and it was kind of a lot of pressure. I could feel her rooting me on and really supporting me. She’s an extraordinarily warm person and really funny. I still remember how it felt to have somebody like that really wanting you to be good. 

You started out as a writer and producer for such children’s shows as Wishbone and The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss. Why children’s shows?

That’s what I was offered. I had a friend who developed Wishbone, which was a great show. I was a graduation speaker at Sarah Lawrence [College] a few years ago, and I mentioned the different things I’d done. That got the biggest reaction. It was really a boot camp for me. In retrospect, it was the perfect training ground. We were taking classic books, and we were distilling them to half-hour versions for kids through the eyes of a dog. It was like a writing exercise concocted by an English teacher on acid. It really forced you to learn what about these books connected with an audience and how to retell it in a dynamic way to keep a kid’s attention. 

Your big break that brought you from behind the cameras to in front of them was appearing on The Daily Show. How did you land that gig?

I was very interested in quirky, marginalized presidential history. I started, on my own nickel, going around the country visiting the homes and grave sites of the presidents you can’t remember. The guys between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The first one I went to was Benjamin Harrison. It just felt like a vein that hadn’t been tapped by anyone else. I just found it really interesting to meet the people who worked at these places. If you’re working at Monticello or Hyde Park, people are already in awe the minute they walk in. But when you work at the Rutherford B. Hayes House in Fremont, Ohio, you’ve really got to sell people. So I started collecting these stories and I tried to sell them as print pieces, and I couldn’t sell them. I met a guy who, at the Warren G. Harding House in Marion, Ohio, would dress up as [Warren’s wife] Florence Harding to give tours of the house. It wasn’t a shticky drag queen act. He was a really good Florence Harding. I met an agent who said, ‘You should be on The Daily Show.’ I went, again on my own nickel, to prepare for an interview, [to] Greeneville, Tennessee, at the home of Andrew Johnson. It was during the Clinton impeachment crisis. I thought, Why don’t I look at how the hometown of our first impeached president commemorates him for clues to how Clinton might be looked at in Hope, Arkansas, in a hundred years? I think Madeleine Smithberg, who was the executive producer—this is right before Jon Stewart came on—was impressed that I would go to such lengths. The first two pieces I did with The Daily Show were the Andrew Johnson piece and the Florence Harding piece.

Did you learn anything about politics in this country during your time at The Daily Show?

It was around the time the Whitewater investigation was going on. Things were starting to get really nasty. [But] they’ve been nasty since the beginning of the republic. …I think I really learned the power of a kind of irony and disparity between what a person says and what they do. That’s the sweet spot—that’s where the funny is. Politicians saying something and doing the exact opposite. Culture war stuff and personality stuff is more television-friendly, it’s more comedy-friendly, but it ignores the really big issues. The reason The Daily Show was never a substitute for news is we were spending all our time on the stuff that was personality-driven. Stuff that really matters, like entitlement reform, doesn’t make for good comedy. 

Your book All the Presidents’ Pets came out in 2004. What do presidents’ pets tell us about them?

I always thought it was amusing that so many of the presidents, in a weird way, match their pets in personality. I’m a Teddy Roosevelt fan, and among his 36 pets he had a one-legged rooster, and his kids built a little crutch for the rooster. I loved that. Of course, I love that Taft had a cow. 

Where did your fascination with obituaries originate?

My father had it. When we grew up, there were two daily newspapers, The Washington Post and The Washington Star. I do remember my father saying, ‘Oh boy, the obituaries is my favorite section of the paper.’ It was not grim or ghoulish; my father was a very optimistic person. I think he liked them because it’s such a great form of storytelling. I think invariably you kind of compare yourself. Competitive obituary reading. ‘My god, he accomplished all that by the time he was 25? Oh great, he went to prison when he was 32!’ 

I’ve been doing this a long time, and I think I’ve learned how to identify a format that has legs precisely because of its limits. An obituary has been a good way for me to tell stories, not just about people, but about objects, foods, countries, teams. There’s a really attractive simplicity to it for me. 

In an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, you said that obituaries should be the one place in journalism where the rule of thumb should be giving people the benefit of the doubt. I found that interesting. Why do you feel that way?

It’s more than an issue of being tasteful. I would amend it to say, “erring on the side of generosity,” because life is hard. I think listing the flaws in a person’s character or the mistakes that they made can oftentimes miss the point of their life. Look, Harry Belafonte died the same week as Jerry Springer. I don’t think it’s appropriate to simply say, ‘Both were great.’ I met Jerry Springer a couple of times. He was very nice. He gave me a very nice compliment when he saw me on CNN, and I like people who like me. 

That’s a good quality in a person.

It’s my favorite quality in a person [laughs]. We have to be proportional. One person was a groundbreaker and dedicated his life to civil rights, and the other person had an audience. 

What’s the difference between an obituary and a Mobituary?

A Mobituary is what gets me in the gut. It’s someone or something that I think deserves another look or an appreciation that they or it never got. I have learned that if I am interested in something and I really throw myself into it, there’s a good chance that I can make other people interested in it. I’d like to make you interested in something that you never thought you’d be interested in. 

I liked doing John Denver because critics were so mean to him and people loved him, and that to me is really interesting. The audience isn’t stupid. I wanted to understand what the audience was responding to.

When I used to go around doing slideshows of forgotten presidents and their homes and grave sites, I got a lot of satisfaction out of it because I’m pretty sure that a lot of the kids that would come to my shows, if they knew what I was going to talk about wouldn’t have showed up. And they were entertained. That’s given me a lot of satisfaction, making people interested in things they didn’t expect to be interested in. 

One thing I learned from my boss at CBS Sunday Morning is the importance of mix. You want people to enjoy a story, but you want them to pull out and appreciate that one kind of story is followed by another. Surprise is also very important to me. A topic that sounds like it’s going to be fun and light and breezy ends up being surprisingly interesting. The death of sitcom characters—I had Henry Winkler and Sandy Duncan on for that—it’s fun, it’s sugary, but it also becomes about suspension of disbelief. 

To flip it around, I like taking a subject like Reconstruction that sounds like, Oh my gosh, am I back in AP history? and then make it go down really easy. It’s a balance. It can’t be too heavy-duty, but I also don’t want it all to be light and breezy. 

When did you join CBS Sunday Morning?

I think 2006 was my first commentary, and then I became a regular correspondent in 2011. The thing about doing commentaries is, I ran out of opinions. 

That doesn’t stop a lot of people on TV, though. 

It does not. Washington is the cradle of meaningless opinions. There is no recession when it comes to the opinion industry. 

What’s the common thread or approach to the selection of topics and the way the stories are reported that makes CBS Sunday Morning iconic?

I think people appreciate the length of the stories. That it takes its time, that it operates at its own rhythm. What I strive to do, I think any reporter does: to get people off of their talking points. To me, the most satisfying part of an interview, especially if it’s a luminary, is that moment, hopefully just a few minutes into the interview, when you see on their face something click, and they go, Oh, you’re listening to me.

I hope that the audience feels like they’re not getting something prepackaged. One of the great things for me about being on The Daily Show is I spent the whole time making fun of reporters and the cliches of reporting and the annoying cadence of reporters, and so it’s almost like I inoculated myself against that. So when I actually became a reporter, if I ever hear that creep into my voice I say, ‘Stop it!’

I know that when I hear my voice on tape, it always sounds funky and weird to me. What’s it like when you see yourself on television?

I like seeing myself unless I look like crap. I actually do think…well, I’ll just say it: I think I’m pretty good looking. Sometimes I’ll see myself and I’ll be like, ‘Wow, you’re pretty good looking.’ I think it’s good that I don’t recognize that all the time. 

Has doing Mobituaries changed your thoughts or feelings about life and death?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what’s it done, and maybe aging would have done this anyway, is it just makes me evaluate choices. I think when you’re in your 20s, you throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. If given a choice—sometimes you’re not given a choice, a job is a job—but if given a choice, I’ll ask myself, Is this really worth my time? Is this what I want to devote myself to? I think spending time with obituaries is good for everyone. Spending time with Mobituaries is even better.

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.

This story appears in the July/August issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Church services had ended hours earlier on this warm Sunday in February, but a distinctly spiritual feel drifted throughout the Potomac townhouse where dozens of people were gathered. Up for discussion: resurrecting the nearly 100-year-old Scotland African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Zion Church, which had been devastated by a 2019 flood. 

Regardless of their race or religion, where they worshipped or lived, what they did for a living or how much their job paid them, this disparate group of Montgomery County residents seemed to share a common virtue: faith. 

Faith in the ability of people to work together, faith in the power of their community to make change, and faith that the little white church by the side of the road, as some of its parishioners lovingly describe it, would one day stand proud again. 

The Rev. Dr. Evalina Huggins, Scotland AME Zion’s pastor, began the event—part info session, part fundraiser, part pep rally—with a few words. “God,” she proclaimed, “we are finding that we are more alike than we are different.” Over the course of the afternoon there were speeches and songs, history lessons and predictions about the future. Rabbi Evan Krame concluded with a prayer. 

“As we move forward from this day, may we all be given the strength, the courage and the wisdom to bring change to this community, to bring hope and love and caring to each other, and to see that new structure built in our days and speedily.”

Already, some prayers have been answered. What in some ways began when a local billionaire saw a TV news report about the destroyed church has developed into the 2nd Century Project, an ambitious $9 million three-phase plan to restore and rejuvenate the church.  

“My ancestors—by hand, if you can imagine—built the original Scotland church,” says LaTisha Gasaway-Paul, a leader in the coalition of church members, Glenstone museum leaders, residents, businesses and politicians tackling the project. “They fought to have a church there so that we could have a place to go to every Sunday. This is just continuing what they did. We need to build it stronger so that in 100 years they won’t be in the same predicament that we’re in now.”

The story of Scotland AME Zion Church is inextricably tied to the place from which it got its name. In 1880, Gasaway-Paul’s great-great-great-grandfather William Dove purchased 36 acres and helped to establish Scotland, a community of formerly enslaved African Americans. Work began on the church in 1915 and was completed in 1924. When it opened, it became the community’s epicenter. In the ensuing decades, baptisms, weddings, funerals as well as recovery ministry meetings and food distribution programs have been held in the modest wooden building. It was placed on the Maryland Inventory of Historic Places in 1992, according to David Buck, director of communications at the Maryland Department of Planning. 

In the 1960s, Scotland’s homes, to which the county had failed to provide running water and sewer service, were falling into disrepair, and many residents were selling their land to speculators. “The community was full of hard-working people,” says Bethesda resident Joyce Siegel, an honorary co-chair of the 2nd Century Project Capital Campaign Committee. “They were paying their taxes but had no water, no sewer, no trash collection. It was unreal.”

Siegel formed Save Our Scotland, which became Scotland Community Development. After years of political fighting and lobbying, Scotland Community Development took control of the land and built 100 townhouses. (The 25 privately owned units and 75 rentals, which were renovated in 2018, remain today.) “We did everything in the church,” Siegel says. “We had monthly meetings. The kids were way behind, so we had tutorial programs almost every night. We had employment programs. We had county officials speak to the people there.” 

When the church was built, it was not in a floodplain. That changed when Seven Locks Road was expanded and raised in the ’60s. From that point, heavy rains caused runoff from the road that flooded the church’s basement. “But for the elevation of the road, you would not have these floods,” says former County Executive Ike Leggett, the 2nd Century Project Capital Campaign Committee’s other honorary co-chair. “Unfortunately, [Scotland] has not been treated with the level of support historically that the county and state and others should have provided. There’s a debt long overdue, and this is compounding many years of neglect that the community has suffered over the years.”

Water damage became commonplace at Scotland AME Zion, but it did not deliver a critical blow until July 7, 2019. That day, strong storms led to flash flooding that filled the basement to its rafters. Worse, water collapsed one of the building’s walls.

Longtime church choir member Chuck Williams was out of town at the time, but he saw the devastation on a video. “You would have thought that the building was in the middle of a river,” says Williams, chair of the Capital Campaign Committee. “You could see from looking at the missing wall, everyone realized that we’re not going to be back in this building for a while.”

Gasaway-Paul felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of her. 

“Our foundation is the church,” she says. “The meetings, the events—when you take that all away, it leaves a void. I did not know what our next steps were going to be at that moment.” 

Mitchell Rales is the co-founder of Danaher, a science and technology conglomerate that
owns more than 20 companies around the world. In February, Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.6 billion. He and his wife, Emily, opened Glenstone, a contemporary art museum, in Potomac in 2006. Listed among its core values is the phrase “meaningful encounters begin with direct engagement.”

After seeing a Channel 4 report on the damage to the church, Rales began investigating, and ultimately offered the aid of the Glenstone Foundation. Staffers there with backgrounds in architecture, engineering, communications and construction management contributed their expertise.

County Councilman Andrew Friedson has championed the project since its inception. “I’m deeply connected to the community and its history. This is about restorative justice and about righting historical wrongs,” says the Democratic representative of District 1, where the church is located. “We have the opportunity to really work together with the community to ensure that this structure that is such an important part of the fabric and history of our community can stand for another 100 years.” 

Among the first steps taken by the church was the hiring of Washington, D.C.-based architectural firm Antunovich Associates to create a blueprint for the future. There are several aspects to the project, says Desmond Grimball, a senior associate at the firm. 

First, the church will be raised more than 2 feet, “just enough to align it with the road to mitigate the flooding issues that have been occurring since that road was raised,” Grimball says. In addition, the building is being stabilized to prevent further erosion of its structure, and the surrounding landscape is being regraded to reduce the risk of future flooding.

During the planning, it became clear that the church’s mission had outgrown its space. So when it’s reopened, the old church will serve as a community center, and a roughly 5,000-square-foot building to be constructed on the property will house the sanctuary and offices. 

“The biggest challenge of the project is the physical constraints,” Grimball says. “It’s a very long, skinny site. It’s bound on the east side by a roadway that created a drainage condition. On the west side it’s bound by a very steep, heavily vegetated hill [down which water flows] right into it. So this long, skinny property basically sits in a bathtub.”

Addressing the water problem was the No. 1 priority, Grimball says. “Beyond that was just what could be developed on the property while respecting the presence and living memory of the existing church,” he says.

A model of the renovated church and the new building were on display during a groundbreaking ceremony on July 9, 2022, almost three years to the day after the catastrophic flood. It was an optimistic day filled with speeches and shoveling, but more setbacks were to come. In late November, the unoccupied church was vandalized by a group of people who broke doors and windows. The case remained open as of early February, according to county police spokesperson Lauren Ivey.

“The saying is: You don’t kick a person when they’re already down,” Gasaway-Paul says. “It was like, How much more can we possibly take? I know that they might not understand the nature of what they did. But when you do things like that, it’s like another dagger. We need uplifting.”

Still, she refuses to be discouraged. Earlier this year the Scotland community announced an expansion of its annual Juneteenth Heritage Festival. It will begin June 17 with a musical gala at the Bethesda Blues & Jazz Supper Club and conclude on June 19 with a Freedom Day concert at the Scotland community. Highlights of the festival, which will be spread across Cabin John Regional Park, Cabin John Village and the Scotland community, include a children’s carnival and music performance, as well as art exhibitions, food and presentations on Black history. Also on the schedule are the second annual Clarence “Pint” Isreal Juneteenth Classic hosted by Bethesda Big Train Baseball at Povich Field, a 5K run, and a classic car show. All proceeds will benefit the 2nd Century Project.

“We envision this event becoming a preeminent destination for celebrating Juneteenth in the state of Maryland and the DMV,” Gasaway-Paul, the festival’s chairperson, says in a press release. 

Work on the church began in February, and the hope is that all three phases will be completed by 2024, in time for its centennial. Williams is confident that will happen. 

“The very first time that we [walked] into Scotland I was expecting that we were going to walk inside and it would be a mausoleum, cobwebs all over the place, a small handful of members trying to hold everything in place,” he says. “But it was full of people. I heard one of the best choirs that I had ever heard. I will be ever so grateful to have a building that we can perform ministries in, that we can hold rehearsals in, and that we can worship in. I’m going to be very happy to see the building, but I am going to be even more happy that we’ll be able to reunite everyone again so we can get back to the business at hand of being a stabilizing force to [the] Scotland community.”

Since the flood, the congregation has held Sunday services in spaces lent by nearby churches. At one point, members were meeting at Gasaway-Paul’s former dance studio, and they’ve assembled on Zoom as well. Gasaway-Paul is grateful for every opportunity that her friends and family have to pray together, but to her, like generations of her family before, there’s only one Scotland AME Zion Church. 

“When you go to a family member’s house, it’s nice, you have a good time,” she says, “but eventually you want to go back home.”

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.

This story appears in the May/June issue of Bethesda Magazine. 

The post Community unites to rebuild Scotland A.M.E. Zion Church appeared first on MoCo360.

Before Bob Brams’ eyelids grew heavy and he drifted off to sleep, he was trying, as always, to stay positive. It was the night of Sept. 14, 2022, and the next morning he was scheduled to undergo an MRI that would reveal whether the tumor in the left frontal lobe of his brain had grown, or whether he could exhale until his next scan four months later.

At 63, Brams is not the athlete he was years ago. That’s understandable. Who among us is? But in his brain—now the venue for a fight between life and death—he was as strong as ever, plotting a game plan for victory.

“Oddly enough, it’s like prepping for a wrestling match,” he says of his thoughts that night. “You’ve got to win. You’ve got to beat this thing.”

The battle that began in late 2014, after an innocuous fender bender led to the discovery of the tumor, will continue for the rest of Brams’ life. He can accept that. What he won’t do is give in to despair, stop living while he’s still breathing, or fade away without making his mark in the campaign against cancer. 

Brams’ successful legal career is over. It was a fatality caused by the tumor and a cavalcade of health crises that followed. He misses his work, but he doesn’t dwell on the loss. Today, he advocates for cancer research. When he’s not raising money to fight the disease through the sale and signings of his book Forever Optimistic: Fighting Brain Cancer, Finding Your Best Path, and Leading a Life With Purpose, he’s living the mantra laid out in its pages. He revels in life’s little miracles, as he sees them. Enjoying a lively lunch with old friends. Taking in a pleasant evening with his wife, Kim, and their 9-year-old dog, Leo, on the front porch of their Bethesda home. Watching a wrestling match with their 26-year-old son, Garrett. 

“I look at miracles differently than I ever did,” he says. “You have to not set your standards too high for miracles, or you might not have one.”

In some ways, Brams already has benefited from several. After two brain surgeries, a hemorrhagic stroke, a coma, a hemophilia diagnosis, radiation and chemotherapy, somehow he’s still here. 

And he plans to stay. 

“I’m not going to die. I’m just not going to,” he says defiantly. “You have to just try to keep going.What else can you do?”

After the September 2022 MRI at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., he went home and waited for the results. When they came via a video chat about four excruciating hours later, his relentless optimism had been rewarded. 

Stable. The tumor had not expanded. 

“It feels like I’ve been given the opportunity to become more effective in the fight against cancer,” he says. “It’s like you kind of have a new lease on life.”

Brams grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, where athletics played a big role in his life from an early age. He started wrestling in the seventh grade, and immediately was taken with the discipline and toughness the sport requires. 

He was a hotshot in middle school, winning most of his matches. Then he got to high school and started tasting defeat. The losses hardened his resolve, and by his senior year he was captain of the team and posted an undefeated regular season. 

“That’s kind of the story of my life,” he says. “I start average and get better.”

He wrestled for two years at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he says he was both a so-so wrestler and student. Despite his middling grades, he became intrigued by the law.

“I saw the competitive aspects of it, winning cases and clients,” he says. “It just seemed to fit with the way I thought about life.”

After graduating from what’s now the Quinnipiac University School of Law, he clerked in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., which led to a career in government contracts and construction law. He eventually joined the renowned D.C. firm Patton Boggs as a partner, working on high-profile cases like the cleanup projects for Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. 

“Bob got the toughest assignments and always found a great solution,” says Jeff Craven, his friend and former colleague at Patton Boggs. “I remember one of our trips to the Middle East in the early 2000s. He was heading the legal team for the new international airport in Doha, Qatar. It was a very big job. Multiyear, dozens of vendors, lots of complexity. Bob handled the very difficult negotiations, but he had the human touch. His ability to listen to people and find a solution has always been one of his strengths.”

Naturally, working on huge cases around the globe was all-consuming. When he was in town, he’d often come home at 8 p.m., grab a bite to eat, then work well into the night.

“We would go on vacation, and the plane doors would be closing, and I would sit in the seat thinking, Is he going to make it?” says Kim, whom he married in 1989. “We would arrive at our destination and there would be file boxes in our hotel room.”

Once Garrett and their daughter, Taylor, now 25, came along, Brams somehow made time for them. He prided himself on never missing a game or a teacher conference. When Garrett started wrestling at age 6, Brams put a mat in the basement.

“We were down there almost every night,” his son says.

Brams was thriving professionally, financially and physically. He felt great in December 2014 as he headed to a routine cardiology appointment. While he was stopped on Willard Avenue near River Road, just a few minutes from his doctor’s office, a car hit him from behind.

It was such a minor accident that the police weren’t called, and Brams continued on to the doctor. The driver of the other car couldn’t have been going more than 25 mph, Brams guesses. 

But in the days and weeks that followed, Brams experienced tingling in his neck and fingers. He was inclined to ignore it, but the family was set to vacation in Mexico, so out of an abundance of caution, Kim’s uncle, a physician, recommended that he get an MRI before they left. 

On Dec. 19, 2014, Brams drove himself to Sibley for the scan. After it was done, he planned to head home to a Hanukkah party the family was hosting, and in a few days to be sitting on the beach soaking up the sun without a care in the world. 

Kim was greeting guests when her phone rang. It was Bob. It’s not a big deal, he told his wife, but the scan had revealed a spot on his brain. You don’t have to come down to the hospital, he said. 

“I hung up on him and I came right down,” she says. 

Decades earlier, Brams had seen a neurologist after experiencing persistent headaches. An MRI then showed a spot on his brain, which was diagnosed as scar tissue probably caused from his wrestling days. No need to worry, he was told. 

But now the spot had apparently doubled in size. The couple’s holiday party went on without them, and doctors kept Bob overnight at Sibley, concerned about a possible seizure. In the ensuing weeks, the Bramses showed Bob’s scan to several doctors, and they received differing opinions on its seriousness. Finally they shared it with a neighbor who was a neurosurgeon. He was sufficiently alarmed that he immediately contacted Dr. Henry Brem, the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who told Brams to make an appointment to see him as soon as possible. 

During an eight-hour surgery on Jan. 13, 2015, at Hopkins, Brem removed as much of the roughly golf ball-size tumor as possible. But he couldn’t get it all. Brams was diagnosed with a grade 2 oligodendroglioma brain tumor. It wasn’t yet cancerous, but it was an extremely big problem. 

According to the Cleveland Clinic, about 1,200 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with oligodendrogliomas each year. They make up about 4% of all primary brain tumors.

“The problem with these tumors is that they’re intimately involved with the normal brain,” Brem says. “That’s the complicating factor in removing these successfully. As you go beyond where it’s pure tumor and you start to go where it’s brain infiltrated by tumor, there’s a need to get the tumor out, but there’s also a risk of damage to the brain. In that sense, [Bob’s surgery] was extremely difficult.”

The relative five-year survival rate for oligodendroglioma is 74.1%, according to the National Cancer Institute, but factors including the tumor grade and type, traits of the cancer, and the person’s age and overall health affect the prognosis.

Brams was asymptomatic before his surgery, and he was lucid after it. But in the neuro-intensive care unit that night, Kim began noticing some odd behavior.

“Bob just didn’t seem right,” she says. “He grabbed the back of his neck and said, ‘Ow.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He wasn’t making sense. I knew something was wrong.”

Brams was suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. Despite the fact that the surgery was on the front of his brain, this was occurring in the back. Brams was put on life support for a week, during which Kim was told that he was the sickest patient in the unit. 

“We just had to pray,” Kim says.

After a month at Hopkins, Brams was transferred to MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he stayed for three weeks. He had trauma to his vocal cords, struggled with his balance and had difficulty walking. 

Although he hasn’t regained much of his memory from the months following surgery, and his voice remains damaged from the stroke and being intubated, Brams’ condition slowly improved over the next three years. His health issues forced him to retire from his job as co-chair of the government contracts and projects group at Greenberg Traurig, the firm he had joined in June 2014. But he was alive. That was most important. 

Physical, occupational and speech therapy filled his days. His wrestling background, both he and Kim believe, played a key role in his resilience. 

“We do think everything he went through medically, the nightmare, that discipline of wrestling really helped him with the mindset,” Kim says. “He was so far down he had to come back.”

Despite the fear and anxiety that returned before every new scan, Brams remained staunchly optimistic about his future. But in 2018, an MRI showed that a portion of the tumor had enhanced. It was now grade 3—Brams had brain cancer.

A second surgery, this time at the University of California San Francisco, was scheduled. Before it, tests showed that Brams had hemophilia. He wonders if that may have played a role in his stroke following his first surgery. 

This time, things went more smoothly. The five-hour surgery, performed by Dr. Mitchel Berger, who was appointed to President Biden’s Cancer Panel in July, removed more of the tumor, and hours after leaving the operating room, Brams was standing up. Three days later he was released from the hospital and walking the hilly sidewalks of San Francisco. 

He underwent six weeks of radiation followed by months of chemotherapy. The radiation damaged his left optic nerve, which affects his sight and depth perception.

Brams, Kim says, is not the same as he was before, and she doesn’t expect that he ever will be. While he looks to be in great shape, he’s physically weaker and tires easily. He has difficulty reading, focusing and concentrating, and has aversions to noise and sunlight. He still struggles with his speech, so when they’re together with others, she often does most of the talking. 

The tumor is now stable, according to Brem. But there’s no telling what the future holds. The harsh reality is that years could pass without it growing, or it could grow before the next scan. 

“The hardest thing for me personally was watching the guy that was there for me unconditionally my entire life have to be out there like a wrestler fighting this by himself,” Garrett says. “We’re his teammates; we’re his biggest supporters; we’re going to do everything we can. But at the end of the day, this fight is between him and cancer.” 

Brams has always had a way with words, both spoken and written. In his previous life, he wrote a book on construction law, and more than two years after his first surgery he began typing his thoughts on his circumstances. Progress was slow, but he found the exercise therapeutic, and began emailing what were essentially journal entries to a small group of family and friends. 

Four painstaking years later, Forever Optimistic was released. The foreword is written by Sen. Chris Coons, a fellow former wrestler from Delaware. Part memoir, part self-help, the book details the ways in which Brams’ life has changed during his ordeal. 

“My medical situation has helped to focus my attention on what I believe is important, and my thoughts revolve around a new set of the uncertainties that have now become very vivid,” he writes. “Hopefully my new-found perspective can help you in thinking about your own life, especially in times of pain, suffering, and uncertainty.”

The legendary wrestler Dan Gable famously said, “Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy.” Bob Brams has certainly stretched that sentiment to its limit. Nothing in his fight has been painless, but the challenges he’s faced have not broken him.  

“I wrestled for so long, you start to get a mindset that it makes you tougher,” he says. “My father always used to say in high school before a match, ‘Get the takedown.’ The takedown is beating cancer. That’s my goal.”

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.   

The post How a former wrestler and high-powered lawyer has been fighting for his life–and for other patients with brain cancer appeared first on MoCo360.

Basketball is in Wes Unseld Jr.’s DNA, but it wasn’t necessarily his destiny. The 47-year-old head coach of the Washington Wizards knew at a young age that he wouldn’t be following his legendary father’s footsteps onto an NBA court. He was a good player at small-time (when it comes to basketball) Johns Hopkins University, where he was a two-time captain and ranked 15th in program history in scoring when he graduated with a degree in economics in 1997. 

The younger Unseld thought he was headed toward a career on Wall Street until his dad, a one-time Hall of Fame player who was then general manager of the Wizards, persuaded him to take an internship with the team. He started on the ground floor but knew after a few weeks that Wall Street would have to wait. 

“I fell in love with the competition,” Unseld says. 

Despite his famous name, nothing was handed to him. The elder Unseld, who spent his entire playing, coaching and front office career with the franchise, was a modest superstar who believed in hard work and education. He made sure his son learned every aspect of the business. Unseld Jr. started his professional journey as a scout, then worked as an assistant coach for the Wizards and three other teams in the league for a total of 16 years before Washington hired him as its head coach in July 2021. 

The job was the culmination of decades of sweat and perseverance. 

“This is truly an honor, to get an NBA coaching job,” he said at his introductory news conference in July 2021. “Certainly, for it to happen here makes it that much more special. I put in a lot of hours to get to this point. For this opportunity to unfold is so gratifying.”

Unseld’s Maryland roots run deep. He grew up in Catonsville, just outside of Baltimore, where his father started his career as a member of the NBA team then known as the Bullets. (The franchise moved to the Washington area in 1973 and changed its name to the Wizards in 1997.) His mother, Connie, founded a private school in Baltimore, where his sister, Kim, still serves as the principal. 

Last year, he and his wife, Evelyn, purchased a home in Potomac, where they live with their 10- and 8-year-old children.

We spoke to Unseld at the MedStar Health Performance Center, the Wizards’ training facility in Southeast Washington, D.C., after a practice in October. He was eager to put last season’s disappointing 35-47 record behind him. Two days later, the team got off to a promising start: The Wizards won their opener, defeating the Pacers 114-107 in Indiana. This interview has been edited and condensed.

We’re 48 hours away from the start of the season. What are your emotions at the moment?

There’s a little bit of angst. I think it’s a natural kind of back-to-school feeling. I like where this group is. It’s exciting to see how all the pieces will fit together. We’ve had a good summer and a good September, a solid training camp leading up to the start of the regular season. Everyone is itching to go. They’ve put in a lot of work. They want to see the fruits of that labor. 

You were raised in Baltimore County. What were the values that your parents instilled in you and your sister?

Very simple: Be a good citizen. Be a good student. Those were the two themes. Regardless of what we were into, what we were doing, just treat people the right way. Just very basic things that sometimes get overshadowed. Although [my father] played a prominent role in his profession, he never overlooked those little things. Be on time, work hard and you’ll get what you deserve. 

Was there a moment when you first realized how famous your dad was?

I don’t remember one specific moment, but there were times when we were kids—obviously this was before social media and everyone had cameras on their phones—but we’d go to dinner as a family and quite often he would be gracious enough to sign autographs and speak to people. …I remember him telling my sister and I, ‘It costs nothing to say hello.’ It’s just a simple gesture. He had an understanding that he was in a privileged position, and within the position came a responsibility to be a good steward of the community and conduct himself in a professional manner. He took that to heart. It was a lesson for us, certainly for me in this business, that humility is not lost. 

How involved was he in molding you as a player growing up?

He wasn’t that involved at all. I think he did that intentionally. He was concerned about the undue pressure that would put on a kid. There were times I did hear parents of other kids make comments like, ‘You’ll never be as good as your dad.’ I’m 6, 7 years old. So he really tried to step back, let me be coached. He didn’t want to overshadow the coaches, didn’t want to become the center of attention, which I can appreciate now. 

You would end up attending Johns Hopkins University. Was that a basketball decision, an academic decision, or both?

I had no intention of staying that close to home, but I had a really good experience as I visited with the coaching staff, with some of the other recruits in my class. I knew at an early age that I wasn’t playing professionally. Just being around it, you had a pretty good insight on what that entails. For me, it was more about education. The thought was to go through school and be able to play at the collegiate level. I enjoyed that experience. 

Your first “job” in basketball was as an intern for the Wizards. What did you learn?

I did everything. My dad, as the general manager at the time, said, ‘You have to learn the business.’ So I interned in every department. The first thing he gave me was the collective bargaining agreement. He said, ‘You’ve got to read it and you’ve got to know it.’ It’s a lot of legal jargon, which gets a little confusing, but I learned the basics. I interned in marketing, sales, PR, human relations
—every facet of the business. Now in the position that I’m in, I have an appreciation for everyone and what they do to help make our jobs easier. It also helps me in my working relationships with those departments because I understand the struggles they have to go through. 

When did you start thinking about coaching?

It didn’t start until my fifth or sixth year in. I was an advance scout, basically sending back reports as I’d go out and see teams, trying to help our team prepare for their next opponent. You start watching so much film and so many games, you’re kind of pulling in different philosophies. You look at certain coach-player relationships and think, I like this; I don’t like that. You’re always writing things down and stealing different ideas. You start formulating ideas, even though you don’t really do it consciously. 

All of a sudden you have a notebook full of stuff. I think that’s where it kind of clicked for me. The relationship I had with the [coaching staff] allowed me inroads to jump from the scouting realm to assistant coaching. 

You were an assistant coach for 16 years. What’s life like for an assistant coach in the NBA? 

There’s a lot of film study, a lot of player development work. A lot of it is being prepared for practice, being prepared for opponents. Finding ways to build connections and relationships with players. I think the benefit I had was the staffs I worked with gave me tons of opportunities and helped me find my voice. It helps build credibility amongst the players. It gave me confidence to do the job.

It’s a lot of long hours. Not quite as long as mine now, but close. 

You interviewed for multiple head coaching vacancies before the Wizards. What did you learn during that process?

Some of them are very direct as far as you’re going to meet the ownership, you’re going to be with the president and GM and that’s it. There’s others where it’s a large group of people and you have to go through a long vetting process. One takeaway is you have to be prepared for anything. What it boils down to is they already know you. You’re just there to confirm what they think they know. 

Did you think it wasn’t going to happen for you?

I stopped worrying about whether or not it would happen. I was a lead assistant, I was an associate head coach, making a great living, working with terrific people, unbelievable players on a winning team. So if this is the worst it gets, this is terrific. 

What was different with the Wizards? Why was this the right time and fit?

I don’t know. (Laughs.) That’s probably a [General Manager] Tommy [Sheppard] question. A lot of it has to do with the amount of success we had in my previous position (as an assistant with the Denver Nuggets). When there’s a coaching change, you look at the landscape, you’re looking at what everyone else is doing. If a team has had success, you want to draw from that and find some type of commonality. Can we mirror that success here?

Your dad passed away in 2020. What do you think he would say about you being the coach of the Washington Wizards?

I think he would be extremely proud, but he would think I was a bit nuts to jump in and do what he did for a number of years. (Unseld Sr. coached Washington—with limited success—from 1988 to 1994.) It was a struggle for him because I think the mindset of some of the guys he was coaching and his approach were different. He got a lot out of the groups that he had. They were tough, they played physical, they were in great condition, but it’s really hard to win in this league. Him as a former elite player, I don’t know if all the players he coached had the same work ethic, had the same mindset. I think that kind of ate at him at times. 

What did you learn last year about being a head coach in the NBA?

There are so many other layers that go beyond basketball. The staffs have gotten much larger. There’s got to be constant communication. Managing the players is one thing, the basketball piece is one thing, but making sure that the messaging is the same, that we’re all pulling in the same direction. We have a terrific staff, hardworking, very good at what they do, but you still have to make sure it aligns with your vision and your direction. 

Even the best NBA teams lose a solid number of games. How do you deal with losing?

It’s not easy. The one takeaway is how we lost. If we’re not competitive, if we’re not doing the things we’re supposed to be doing, that’s where the frustration comes. If we did everything right, if the process was solid and you just didn’t make shots, or that team excelled, you know, you’re not going to win them all. But if we’re not playing the right way, we’re not moving the ball, we’re not defending, if there are certain tactical things we’re not doing, that’s when the frustration filters in. 

We hear the term “culture” a lot in sports. What does it mean to you, and how do you go about establishing your culture in an organization? 

I like the term culture, but I think it’s often overused when it comes to sports. 

I think the assumption is that you can just acquire it. I don’t think that’s the case. It takes years to continue to build. Things can collapse in a moment. For me, I look at culture as an accumulation of your habits. If you’re consistent with your habits, if you care enough to do them, that becomes your culture and what you’re identified with. It’s not something you just put a stamp on and say, ‘This is our culture.’ 

I’m sure there’s a lot of stress being a head coach in the NBA. What do you enjoy most about it?

There is a lot of stress. (Laughs.) Teaching, honestly. When you see that light bulb moment and guys get it and grasp it. That’s probably the most rewarding. 

Do you have specific goals for this season?

I do have some internal goals that I’ve not shared with anyone. Bottom line, our goal is to be better than we were a year ago. From top to bottom. Win-loss column, in our efficiency, how we travel, how we practice. Be better in every facet of the game. I think that will help translate to wins. I don’t know what number that is, but I do think that we have a lot of untapped potential. 

You live in Potomac with your family. What do you like about living in Montgomery County?

We purchased out there in March and we moved in in June. Just the privacy. We’re in an area that’s tucked away. It’s very peaceful. We’re in a wooded area, so we see deer and fox and animals running around. It feels like a sanctuary. It’s very relaxed. You can step back a little bit from the rat race and relax. 

We have plenty of areas for the kids to play. We’ve got a little sport court, a pool, so it’s like their own little park. 

What does the Unseld family do for fun together?

We love movies. It was tough getting through COVID because we couldn’t go to the movies. Movie night, whether out or just throwing something on TV and popping some popcorn, all of us enjoy that. 

Do you ever have a moment when it hits you and you think, Wow, I’m the coach of the Washington Wizards?

Quite often. There are times when I’m out running errands and people want to stop me and ask for autographs. I’m like, ‘Mine? Are you serious?’ You do sit back and think, There are only 30 of these [jobs] in the world, and I’m blessed to have one of them. I certainly don’t take it lightly. I do understand and realize how fortunate I am.

Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore. 

The post Meet Wes Unseld Jr., the Washington Wizards coach living up to a local legacy appeared first on MoCo360.

Two years ago, we introduced you to 13 medical heroes on the front lines as COVID-19 first gripped the world. It was a time of great uncertainty. The situation was unlike anything these health care workers had dealt with, and there was no clear treatment.

These professionals layered on cumbersome personal protective equipment and put in marathon shifts. Worried about bringing the virus home, they told us about changing out of their scrubs in the garage and, in some cases, isolating for weeks from their families. Many leaned on their “work families,” who understood the shared trauma of caring for patients who were often alone at the end of life except for the staff at their bedsides.

So much has happened since our first interviews in the spring of 2020 that we wanted to return to those we profiled.

In our follow-up conversations with eight of them, we heard stories of heartache, dedication and resilience. Some sought therapy to cope with the hardship. They recount individual patients lost with clarity, and sometimes raw frustration with the unvaccinated. 

Yet, most remain hopeful and committed to their profession. They talk of learning from the experience and feeling better prepared for the next crisis. They found joy when they could finally share in a celebration with their colleagues face-to-face. Many say they are finding themselves increasingly aware of the fragility of life and seizing on any downtime they can grab to re-energize for each wave.

Dr. Manu Kaushal

Dr. Manu Kaushal was so careful to protect his family in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic that he left his scrubs in the garage and slept in the basement of his Rockville home. The only family member he would touch was Demo, their Cavalier King Charles spaniel.

As medical director of critical care and pulmonary rehabilitation at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney, Kaushal says the isolation was a necessary sacrifice because of the unknown impact the virus could have on his daughter, Reva, who was born in January 2020.

His family made it all the way to Christmas 2021 before the omicron variant hit. “We created a bubble. The weak link was [Reva], who was unvaccinated and going to day care. That’s where she got it,” says Kaushal, 42. Reva, who tested positive on Dec. 26, was sick for about a week. Then Kaushal and his wife, Dr. Vandhna Sharma, 37, and his 76-year-old mother all tested positive for COVID but had few or no symptoms—and no long-term effects.

“It was very disheartening because we had always protected ourselves,” Kaushal says. “But I had very high confidence in the vaccine. …Going through COVID and recovering and being asymptomatic throughout all this just raised my confidence in the vaccine completely.”

Most patients with COVID in hospitals are unvaccinated, Kaushal says. 

One of Kaushal’s intensive care unit patients earlier this year, he recalls, was a man in his late 40s who chose not to get vaccinated and opposed his teenage children getting the shots. He said he’d done his research and was taking vitamins but then realized the severity of the situation. “You could see the remorse in his eyes,” Kaushal says. 

Facing death, the patient pondered what he could do. Kaushal recalls telling him, “You’ve got to get the people around you, your kids, vaccinated. It’s very important.” But the man didn’t survive. Later, the patient’s daughter got vaccinated, but the son remained adamant. If his father didn’t do it, he wouldn’t either, Kaushal says. 

ICU staff members witnessed so much loss during the pandemic that they had to get creative to process it, Kaushal says. So together, they painted pictures. In one, stars in the sky represent patients who died. In another, flowers symbolize those who survived. These works now hang in an ICU hallway at the Olney hospital.

By this past spring, Kaushal says, it was beginning to feel more normal at the hospital and with his family. His wife completed a National Institutes of Health fellowship in June and joined  MedStar staff in Olney as chief of inpatient endocrinology.

The family did suffer a loss. Fourteen-year-old Demo, Kaushal’s “savior” early in the pandemic, died last year. Not only was the dog good company, but Kaushal recalls he was constantly sniffing Demo to make sure he hadn’t lost his sense of smell—a possible symptom of the virus.

After missing so many milestones with Reva as a newborn, Kaushal is trying to spend as much time with her as possible. She’s already old enough to love Pixar movies, he says. 

In March, the family got a golden retriever puppy. They named the pup Wall-E in honor of Reva’s favorite movie, one they’ve watched nearly 50 times.

Lauren Sundergill

Little did Lauren Sundergill know that volunteering to work in the intensive care unit at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in the spring of 2020 would become an on-again, off-again gig for nearly two years. With each lull in the ICU, she returned to her position as a behavioral health nurse in the psychiatric unit of the Olney hospital—but the transition was hard. 

“I felt like I didn’t really belong” back in the psychiatric ward, says Sundergill, 38. There, none of the patients were COVID-positive, and she and other staff members didn’t face the same fears about entering patient rooms for hours, clothed in protective gear. “There was so much I had seen and done that they hadn’t. I felt like a different person.”

For a while, Sundergill says, she had nightmares and anxiety bordering on panic. There was one instance she just couldn’t shake. She performed CPR on an older man, but he didn’t survive. It was particularly upsetting afterward to interact with members of his family because they hadn’t been permitted to be with him in the hospital. “I just really needed to get some help to process that and get over it so that I could go back to work and start connecting with patients again because I put up a wall, big time,” she says.

Sundergill met with a therapist online who helped her work through the trauma, and she has subsequently encouraged her fellow ICU nurses to do the same to maintain their mental health.

Another challenge has been the changing public sentiment toward health care workers. 

“In the beginning, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, you guys are so wonderful,’ ” she recalls. “Then it really did a 180.

“People got pretty nasty,” Sundergill says. “Patients, their family members, people were outright telling us that we’re lying. ‘COVID isn’t a thing.’ ‘Why won’t you give [out] this medication?’ 

“You name it, and people were calling, demanding that we give it to their family members. We’re talking Viagra, ivermectin, random medications that didn’t even make sense.” 

Still, Sundergill says, the staff provided great care. 

“It didn’t matter if they were unvaccinated. It was frustrating, especially when they were young and didn’t make it, because it hurt more,” she says. She thought, We have something that could have helped you.

While putting in long hours at the hospital, Sundergill undertook a two-year process to earn her nurse practitioner degree, which she received in December 2021. Unable to take a vacation during the most difficult days of the pandemic, she finally took two months off before starting her new position as a nurse practitioner in the MedStar psychiatric unit in late April.

During the break, Sundergill and her fiancee moved from Rockville to Ellicott City. The two had planned to wed in Hawaii on April 26, 2020, but the pandemic made that impossible. Now that grand plan doesn’t seem as important as just being married, so they are likely to have a courthouse ceremony, Sundergill says.

Sundergill says the pandemic revealed to her the fragility of life—because everyone was vulnerable.

“I have a much deeper appreciation for slowness—just watching the birds in my backyard,” she says. “With COVID, it literally could have been anybody. That kind of realization of, Wow, this really could be me at any time—it shifted my mindset to just living in the moment and being more present.”

Patricia Aparicio 

In November 2021, staff at Holy Cross Germantown Hospital gathered for a tree planting ceremony and blessing to honor those who had died at that point in the COVID-19 pandemic. Patricia Aparicio, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, painted on a small stone: “For all the lives that perished in the ICU rest in peace.” She placed it at the base of the sapling, joined by other colleagues doing the same.

“I don’t know if you ever let go. You just have to think about the good things that you did and you were able to accomplish under difficult circumstances,” says the 48-year-old who lives in Boyds. “They will always have a special place in your heart.”

Two years ago, Aparicio described getting attached to her patients and the emotional toll it took, especially when family members weren’t allowed in the hospital because of COVID restrictions. Her co-workers have been her best source of support, she says, truly able to understand the experience of being at the bedside of dying patients. 

Aparicio never counted the losses, she says, because she didn’t want to become like a machine—insensitive to the needs of her individual patients. It required balance to be emotionally supportive while maintaining the energy and focus needed to provide critical care, she says. 

As for getting vaccinated, Aparicio says she’s come to accept that some won’t do it. Still, she tries to educate her unvaccinated patients at the hospital.

“At the end of the day, we had to respect patients’ choices,” she says. “We’re not there to judge. We’re there to take care of them.”

By the time the omicron wave hit last December, Aparicio says her team was mentally exhausted, and she wanted to get away for the first time since the pandemic began. She, her husband and their two grown children flew to Las Vegas for four days. 

“It was a Christmas present for the whole family,” she says. Not a fan of the slots, she says she enjoyed just walking around outside. Even in December, Vegas was sunnier than Bethesda and temperatures were in the 70s. “I just needed to see a different scenario, different than home and work.”

Next, Aparicio says she’d like to go to the Caribbean, but was hesitant to book too far in advance because of the uncertainty of the virus.

“What we hope, and what is going to happen, they are two different things,” she says. “Right now, our new routine is when the [COVID infection] numbers are going down, we’re coming out. When the numbers are going up, we’re going inside. …As nurses and doctors, we adapt. We adapt to changes. It was hard and it was challenging, but we adapt.”

Dr. Rachel Vile

The low point, says Dr. Rachel Vile, came around Christmas and in January of this year, when the omicron variant was putting people with COVID back into the intensive care unit at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring at an alarming rate. 

“People were vaccinated and still getting COVID, which was extremely depressing because we thought we had a cure,” she says. “But we had some vaccinated people dying. They all had preexisting conditions. Healthy people who got COVID were fine.”

Vile, 53, works as the hospital’s medical director of critical care. She’s the liaison between the critical care unit and the administration. To her, it’s irrelevant whether a patient is vaccinated. One patient refused to acknowledge that they had COVID before being placed on a ventilator. That patient later died. 

“By the time you come to the ICU you’re so sick that we need to do everything we can for you. Blood is the same color no matter what you do, no matter what the politics are. If you’re sick in the ICU, I just want to take care of you. I don’t care how you got there.”

Vile, who is married with three teens, has reflected a lot in the past few years. She’s increased her focus on self-care. She spends more time with friends, reading for pleasure, and exercising.  

When tragedy strikes, she gives herself time to grieve. If she doesn’t, she says, the sadness will eat her alive. She spends time in one of the hospital’s newly created oasis rooms, where she can contemplate life and death. Luckily, she hasn’t been sick with COVID, and no one among her friends and family has died from it. One colleague, however, contracted the disease and has had to permanently stop working because of the long-term effects. 

In the spring, the hospital had only one COVID patient in the ICU. The availability of new drugs like Paxlovid, given to patients who meet certain criteria, has helped treat mild to moderate forms of the disease. Since then, however, she has seen more patients with complications such as a blood clot or a heart attack.

Vile is quick to point out that the vaccine has made a huge difference in the severity of disease in patients. 

“Over the course of two years, we’ve tried to provide all the care we can for every patient,” she says. “I try to enjoy the victories and grieve over the ones that don’t make it. Don’t try to compartmentalize the sadness; try to deal with it in the moment. I still take such pride in the patients that we helped. When I feel I’ve made a difference, it means the world to me.”

Scott Graham

Many people are eager to put the COVID-19 pandemic behind them, but Scott Graham wants to remember all the details. His job at Holy Cross Health is to be ready for the next crisis, so that means reviewing the response to the latest one. 

As director of emergency preparedness and safety, Graham ran the Incident Management Center for Holy Cross Health, Maryland Region, located in Silver Spring. Although the center closed its doors this past March, the hospital continued to monitor developments regarding the virus. But the focus has shifted to compiling an after-action report that will include interviews of those involved in every aspect of the health care system’s response to the pandemic.

“That document will serve as opportunities for us to do things differently, or opportunities for us to not have to re-create a wheel should something like this happen again,” says the 58-year-old, who has not taken a vacation day since the pandemic began.

The report will build on a July 2020 internal “pause and learn” review Graham helped conduct, co-authoring an article about the results in the Physician Leadership Journal. While Graham says the response went well in the first six months of the pandemic, there were unexpected challenges, such as a fractured supply chain, staffing shortages and fast-moving variant waves.

“Omicron really shook our trees,” Graham says of the surge in late 2021 that hit many Holy Cross health care workers and created a labor crunch. The hospital developed a staffing resource pool with job descriptions for tasks that could be done by a substitute—and the creative approach worked, he says. Graham credits members of the hospital’s executive leadership who stepped in to fulfill basic jobs, such as delivering food trays and cleaning rooms to keep the hospital running during the winter holidays. 

After celebrating Christmas with his wife and two grown daughters at their farm in Comus, near Sugarloaf Mountain, Graham drove into Silver Spring about 8 p.m. to work the overnight shift at Holy Cross Hospital and allow others to spend part of their holiday at home. He had wanted to be with his mother and extended family in Cumberland but didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk with the virus still threatening. It would have been particularly comforting to be together then, he says, as his father, Dick
Graham, a Maryland state trooper for nearly 59 years, had died unexpectedly in July 2021. 

“He gave me my heart for public service,” Graham says of his dad, who he didn’t see in person very often during the last year of his life. “One thing I’ve absolutely, positively hated about the pandemic was the separation.”

Graham says being able to help during the COVID-19 crisis validated his career choice in public safety, which included 27 years with the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service.

“So much of this successful pandemic response was based on…people willing to serve others who don’t know how sick they are, you don’t know where they are in their walk in life, you don’t know who they just lost,” Graham says. “To serve humanity is probably the greatest calling that anyone can have. And even more importantly, to lead people to be able to do what they do best.”

Dr. Atul Rohatgi 

While the intensity of the COVID-19 crisis has abated, Dr. Atul Rohatgi says he’s busy in new ways at Suburban Hospital. The Bethesda hospitalist, an internal medicine physician who cares for patients exclusively in a hospital setting, is mentoring other hospitalist leaders in the region—on top of putting in more hours to cover staffing shortages.

“It’s been tough,” the 47-year-old says of the extra work for his team of 50 physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants. “As a hospital, you can’t be like an office and just say: ‘We’re closing our doors. We can’t see patients.’ It just means everyone has to do more—and it’s been continuing now for over two years. There has not been a chance to really just take a deep breath and sigh.”

In the early days of the pandemic, Rohatgi helped craft a manual for the care of COVID-19 patients. It was updated with each surge, he says, and became a model of sorts for other area institutions to adapt. Mentoring colleagues at Howard County General Hospital and Sibley Memorial Hospital in Northwest Washington, D.C., has been a welcome challenge, Rohatgi says, and a chance to focus more on the big picture of care. “I also get to learn a higher level of hospital medicine across the system instead of just at an institution,” he says. 

At Suburban, Rohatgi’s team is finding new ways to stay connected. Instead of doing group TikTok dances at the end of shifts as they did in the spring of 2020, many are playing Wordle together, and the team’s book club has restarted after taking a hiatus.

Rohatgi refers to his colleagues as his “work family” and says they are a social group. They were eager to have a party when they all could get together unencumbered, but didn’t want to gather too early and risk holding a “super-spreader event,” he says. In early July, Rohatgi says, about 20 members of his team enjoyed dining together outdoors at a Rockville restaurant.

“COVID fatigue” was real, Rohatgi says, but the hospital staff did what was needed. “I don’t want to go through another surge, but if we had to, I would feel confident that this institution would manage it as smoothly as it could be,” he says. “Say something similar would happen in 10 years, it would be a heck of a lot easier for us to pull together and know how to approach this.”

In April, Rohatgi got on an airplane for the first time since the pandemic began for a vacation in California with his wife and two teenage children. This summer he planned to take a two-week Boy Scout backpacking trip with his son in New Mexico. “That’s probably just as scary for me as COVID because I’m not an outdoors guy. But it’s an experience I want to share.”

Laura Ventura

Laura Ventura could hardly have been greener when, eight months after graduating from nursing school, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. She worked in Suburban Hospital’s progressive care unit then—essentially one step removed from the intensive care unit—and two years later she still recalls vividly the weight of the job. 

“I would get off work and sit in my car and have a breakdown after shifts,” says Ventura, 26. “There was a time when every single patient that I had was declining, and I felt like there was nothing that I could do about it. I was watching all these people not getting better, and that’s very difficult. It’s hard for nursing to feel rewarding when you’re experiencing that.”

Since then, things have improved personally and professionally for Ventura, who now splits her time between Suburban’s intermediate care unit and Sibley Memorial Hospital’s ICU. She cares for COVID patients much less often these days, but that doesn’t erase the memories of those she knew who didn’t make it. 

Before June 2020, Ventura hadn’t lost a patient under the age of 50, a situation that sadly didn’t last. A year later, her unit moved to the floor at Suburban that once housed the hospital’s COVID ICU. The shift triggered memories of seeing patient after patient intubated, each one seemingly doing worse than the last. 

“We experienced a lot of people crashing and having emergencies at the same time, dying on the same shift,” she says. “I have a memory bank of patients who touched me. I think about the patients who I have connections with, who tell me their stories. I tell them my story, and we make that connection. That stuff doesn’t leave me.”

Ventura occasionally sees a therapist to help her process what she’s gone through. She says reacquainting herself with her friends post-quarantine and practicing daily yoga and meditation have improved her mental health. But nothing has been more important than adding a furry friend to her household. Her cat, Lucifer Hellfire—Lucy, for short—usually greets her at the door of her Silver Spring home after she returns from one of her three weekly 12-hour shifts. 

“I work nights, so I come home and all my roommates are at work, so it’s just me and the cat,” she says. “He’ll come and snuggle up next to me in bed and it’s just the absolute best.”

There was plenty of cuddle time in March when Ventura contracted COVID. It was a mild case, she says, that felt like a cold. She missed just two days of work. 

Nearly three years into her nursing career, she says she can’t imagine doing anything else for a living. 

“I already knew that it was hard when I started, but I learned that you have to come in there each day with all this energy to give to people,” she says. “You need to fill your tank to make sure that you have enough for yourself and for all of the people you’re taking care of.” 

Nimeet Kapoor 

At the beginning of the pandemic, Nimeet Kapoor was the newly hired nursing manager of the intensive care unit at Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville. It was a stressful time for everyone in the health care industry, but particularly for Kapoor, who was 31 at the time and tasked with adding two ICUs to treat COVID patients. 

He didn’t realize the toll the job was taking on him until he posted a photo of himself on social media in May 2020. 

“Somebody said, ‘Nimeet, you look good. Thin,’ ” he recalls. “I weighed myself, and I didn’t realize that I’d lost 30 pounds in like six months.”

He wasn’t dieting, so over the next year he made an effort to eat a healthy breakfast and lunch, two meals he had often skipped because he was so busy at work. He joined a gym and started going on regular walks with his two dogs and wife, whom he married in October 2020. 

Kapoor has a new role at Adventist HealthCare now, as the system’s program director for staffing management services. 

“When I was in the ICU as a manager, one of the things I had a passion for was ensuring that we can get the right processes in place to get the right staff in the right places,” he says.

Kapoor worked as a nurse for eight years before shifting to administrative roles, so he knows how exhausting the profession can be. He remembers walking through Shady Grove’s ICUs after the first surge and noticing how drained the nurses looked. He arranged for therapists and chaplains to be available for the staff, and he set up meditation sessions for those who were interested. 

Kapoor himself wasn’t immune to the emotional strain the disease caused. He recalls a patient with seven children whom doctors determined was terminal. When they went to remove the patient’s breathing tube, only two of the kids could be there. 

“The family had to decide which two kids to have bedside when it happened,” he says. “There are a lot of decisions that have to be made about end-of-life care. At the time, there was a week when we were seeing one death a day, which is not typical in the ICU. That was extremely challenging not just for family members, but for our staff, too, because they’re the ones who are trying to empathize with the families.” 

The experience profoundly changed the way he looks at life. 

“When I saw people my own age come to the hospital with COVID and become seriously ill, it made me appreciate what I have,” says Kapoor, 33, of Gaithersburg. “I was fortunate enough to have a good family and nobody around me got severely ill. It made me appreciate life a lot more.”

This story appears in the September/October 2022 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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