Michael Schaffer’s article on the proposed second convention center was first-rate (“When Pigs Fly,” 1/9), as was Bradford McKee’s very informed and informative Chinatown-focused profile of the planning debacle that is the District (“East Side Story,” 1/9).

This kind of serious, well-researched exposé is all too rare in your paper and all too absent from the Washington Post. It was particularly refreshing that your writers avoided the sneering, plague-on-all-your-houses, everyone’s-a-jerk tone of what has passed for muckraking exposé in your paper in recent years.

Capitol Hill