Charlie Peters, the man who tried to save Washington

For those who thrive in Washington, DC, the city is so pleasant they often lose sight of how smug and insular it can be—how abstracted from the country it is meant to serve. They arrive with dreams of changing the world, and some even do so, a bit. But the city changes them, too. Over the years their innate proportions of idealism and careerism, though both to some degree ever-present, tend to migrate towards the latter.