As of Friday, I’m leaving City Paper to enter a doctoral program at UNC Chapel Hill. It’ll be a lot like working here, except the dick jokes are fancier.

I’m going to miss covering baseball-bat crime; waxing pedantic about bad drivers; conducting opaque interviews with Zachary Mason and Van Morrison; reporting on Elie Wiesel‘s undue influence over Jewish theater in D.C.; remembering racial segregation in northeast; tracing the career arc of a little-known band called Das Mötørbike; offering unsolicited advice to M.I.A.; making futile attempts to resurrect this paper’s opera coverage; writing open letters to outgoing Washington Post columnists; bemoaning Eminem’s newfound sobriety; tracking down lost icons of D.C. soul; scratching my head over the indulgences of Jim Jarmusch; crashing the State of Kentucky Inaugural Ball with Ms. Hess; directing videos on newsroom fisticuffs and the idiosyncracies of one Erik Wemple; riding Darrow‘s coattails to the AAN award finals; and, perhaps most of all, editing this paper’s tireless coverage of the Capital Fringe Festival.

Henceforth, the film and theater pages—and the colorful freelancers associated with each—are in the able hands of J.L. Fischer, and the redoubtable Emily Kaiser will now be running the paper’s online version.

The publisher’s youngest, meanwhile, will have to find someone else to give him piggyback rides around the building.

Lots of love, folks.