What’s the best way to see the Navy’s Blue Angels flight demonstration team amid its practice and performance during the Naval Academy’s Commissioning Week festivities? The show tops our weekly list of things to do in Annapolis.

The Naval Academy Class of 2026 on Wednesday morning joined a long list of plebes who, for over 60 years, have scrambled up an obelisk to swap a midshipman’s cover for a Dixie cup.

The goal of this rite of passage is for classmates to scale the monument, which is covered with shortening, remove the “Dixie cup” hat at the top and replace it with an upperclassman’s hat, called a “cover.” With this, the freshmen are no longer considered plebes.

When the new Hillman garage opens next month, it signals the next phase of remaking City Dock. Some details are still being finalized.

Seven ideas that are worth your time, including a race for the rest of us.

Annapolis is a small town, and most days a safe one. But over the years that I’ve called it home, the bodies keep piling higher and higher. It’s a geography of violence where we step over the men, women and children killed by guns.

A ceremony Friday capped 40 years of struggle to open a waterfront park in Anne Arundel County, involving historic forces that continue to limit public access to the Chesapeake Bay, difficult negotiations with neighbors and disagreement over the right way to balance 340 acres of impossible beauty as both an environmental treasure and recreational jewel.

Anne Arundel County opened Beverly Triton Nature Park Friday, a rare Chesapeake Bay beach open to the public through a daily pass system. Located about 30 minutes south of Annapolis on the Mayo Peninsula, the park opened four decades after the county bought the one-time segregated resort.

U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin’s decision not to seek reelection in 2024 has set off a scramble for the coming open Senate seat. It got me thinking about the most important qualities in a senator.

Almost no one thinks about me until it’s time. Taxes and Death: always an afterthought. But it’s budget season in Maryland and beyond, when cities, counties and even those doofuses in Washington are fighting over me and my sister, Spend. So it’s a good time to catch up. You mortals have to deal with me sooner or later. I am eternal.

Rear Adm. Yvette M. Davids has an impressive resume. But if you want a clue as to why she was picked over two other finalists for the post of Naval Academy superintendent, you might find it in her current role as director of the Learning to Action Drive Team. It’s part of the Navy’s efforts to fix a problem with its culture: training and performance failures.

Let’s take a walk to the water for Earth Day.

Organizers asked me to moderate a panel on racial and social justice because I’ve been reporting on these ideas for much of my career as a journalist. But listening to people who focus on this issue daily provided some revelations worth sharing.

Will Annapolis disappear in a cloud bank of pot smoke on July 1? Will it reek of the devil’s cabbage? And most importantly to me, should I get high? As we approach the end of pot prohibition in Maryland, I’ve got questions.

Deep within the litany of outrages by the Catholic Church documented by the Maryland Office of the Attorney General report, there is a revelation as shocking as the predatory priests or the religious bureaucracy eager to hide its sins.

Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley and DaJuan Gay sparred at a recent council meeting over the alderman’s state of mind, and whether the mayor was out of line.

When the General Assembly wraps up Monday and lawmakers head home, they’ll talk about their accomplishments and failures. Headline-grabbing big bills will feature in that conversation. But so will less splashy matters, like rewriting a 32-year-old law on trees.

Maryland’s small-town state capital has a formula for the number of officers, but it’s suddenly not working.

Anne Arundel was the first county in Maryland to put suicide prevention pamphlets in gun shops. On Tuesday, a federal judge threw out a First Amendment challenge to the law from a gun rights group.