After repeated nav redesigns and dynamic page switchouts killed my daily reading of the Post print edition indexes (if I'm missing a feed to get all of the headlines at once, please point me to it), I found that Edward P. Jones profile linked in the paper's new Story Lab blog.

Yes, as an ex-Post.com-er rightly vented to me today, the Post needs to realize everything should not have its own blog. Here's a scary full list of them, somewhat out of date. But I may try Story Lab for a while. The blog comes from the new local enterprise reporting squad, under the direction of Marc Fisher, formerly the country's best combined local columnist/blogger. His small team is narratively dangerous and young enough to have a chance at being the voices that save the paper.

What's the team missing? Web journalists. That's inexcusable, and I hope they're knocking down merger walls now to integrate talent. If the team sees its mission as just newspaper writing, with only Web integration on the initial reporting end, then… that's too bad. I hope not. You can't save writing alone. You have to save storytelling.

The blog posts so far give me some worries there: hard-launching the blog with a call for tattoo anecdotes, talk of reporter notebooks, the uncomfortable conflation of crowdsourcing and transparency debate. Same with a team reporter saying in his bio that he doesn't tweet (I don't care if you don't until you proclaim it) and linking to the printer version of an Esquire story (torturing Web folks on a line-width rack).

I am hopeful. A life Post fan, I have to be. It just needs to get around harder online. Getting half the great minds into a room isn't enough.

Read Neely Tucker's Post profile of Edward P. Jones. Amid it:

He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver's license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.

He has a friend cut his hair instead of going to the barbershop. Cooking, he says, is plunking a chicken in the oven "until it doesn't bleed when I stick it." He has a fondness for soul food, most particularly chitlins. If he is to have dinner with friends on, say, Wednesday, "I start worrying about it on Sunday. It sort of eats the whole week up, and then I get there, and I have a wonderful time and wonder what I was so worried about."

The story is somehow the Post's first full-length profile of Jones. Maybe I'm missing something, but beyond reviews, the longest previous piece is '05 coverage of the never-learned-how-to-do-drive author's reading at a Volvo dealership (the last time I blogged about Jones in the Post).

But Tucker more than makes up for lost time. Watching Jones, you get closer to the roots of his storytelling and purposefully sparse existence than in any profile of him you've read, yet you're consistently reminded you know relatively nothing, same as Jones, as Tucker, as everyone.

A caution: Don't visit the gallery. The photos are good, but one breaks the story's spell too easily and feels internally spiteful/sloppy. I'm sure there's no story-perspective-destroying spite at work, but poor form.

Caught the Brian Setzer Orchestra at Strathmore Friday, with a visiting Cleo, her boyfriend Jeremy — a trombonist in the band, seen below in the my blurry cellcam photo next to Mr. Setzer — and their friend Ricky Danger. The older audience had trouble standing up, making jumping, jiving and wailing out of the question, but the performance was terrific. A horn+guitar Nutcracker Suite may have been my favorite part. Tried to chase the Blessed Sacrament alum bar night at Ri-Ra, missed them, had a good time catching up and relaxing at neighboring Cafe Deluxe.

After the turkey, the gravy and the pie, here's the "Adam K and Soha Club Mix" of Magnificent. The original is one of the better songs on No Line on the Horizon, but the remix is easily twice as good. Good for U2 for releasing it. Available on iTunes, Amazon and elsewhere.

This song, of course, got me Googling for what serious U2 fans see as the best remixes over the band's career. A "Top 8 Alternative Songs" essay surfaced on atU2.com with a remix atop the list and interesting interpretations of "alternative" in the other seven slots. Nearly all sent me to YouTube for listening, but the remix was the best of the bunch: Francois Kevorkian's 1983 New Year's Day. His take meshes vocal/lyric outtakes and released bits with an extended, airy version of the beat.

(And, yes, Orbit's Electrical Storm. But the original is what's new to me.)

Neri Oxman, 33, MIT Media Lab Ph. D candidate. Photo is Esquire's. My first thought is for the future of my blue couch. Then much, much more.

Come back in twenty years and, if Oxman has her way, her world will look very different — buildings will be curvy and organic, echoing the structure of, say, pinecones or human skin. But more than that, the buildings will practically be alive. They'll move and adapt. Carbon nanotube walls will breathe through pores that change sizes. Chairs will reshape themselves to fit your body as you sit down. Clothes will have information from your DNA encoded in them and literally grow as you do.

Oxman — full profile here — is one of Esquire's 2009's "Top 23 Radicals and Rebels Who Are Changing the World." Other quality links: a Fast Company profile, a piece with a fantastic quote ("Forget about the way it looks — think about how it behaves"), and a video of Oxman at work against a discussion of cross-discipline needs. Her site is down, but her blog has more links. And, lastly, from Business Innovation Factory:

At her interdisciplinary research initiative, MATERIALECOLOGY, Oxman takes a contemplative approach to design. She asks atypical questions. Not, what type of building do we want to design? But, what behavior do we want to achieve with this space? What human and environmental values will be important here and how do we design a structure to accommodate those values?

"We're accustomed to thinking in terms of types and typologies," Oxman says. "We begin with specific a-priori high level rules and work toward some desired product. In search of new ways of designing I ask how we may decode the type, how to reject it by openly reconsidering its functionality? That's why values are crucial."

"Lester D. Shubin, 84, a Justice Department researcher who turned a DuPont fabric intended for tires into the first truly effective bulletproof vests, saving the lives of more than 3,000 law enforcement officers, died after a heart attack at his Fairfax County home."

The Washington Post, via my parents' mention at Thanksgiving. Shubin was also among the troops that liberated Dachau, an early proponent of bomb-sniffing dogs and survived by his wife of 50 years. Cool life.

Also up there for me: Bob Twigg, 62, the USA TODAY reporter who won $9 million in the lottery. I'd somehow never heard his story around the office before. From the Post obit: "In January 1996, working a Sunday morning shift in the USA Today newsroom, he looked at a newswire story about the winning lottery numbers, 3-15-17-28-33-37."

The next day, a lawyer-friend verified the ticket with the state lottery office. Mr. Twigg begged off a news conference, wanting to break the news in his own paper.

Mr. Twigg wrote that he had been struggling with family medical bills, even though his company health insurance paid 80 percent of its cost. In addition to his journalism job, he had taken a part-time job at a hardware store and drove an eight-year-old Pontiac with 187,000 miles on the odometer that had just failed a state inspection. He had dropped out of the office Super Bowl pool because he had already lost $31.50 during the playoffs and didn't think he had the luck to pick the winner.

Can't find his story online anywhere, will keep looking.

Update: Found it in our internal archive. Will see if someone can pub it somewhere. Romenesko could like it. For now, an excerpt:

On the way home, I was over-the-edge careful. I barely reached 50 on the 55-mph highways. With the ticket tucked in my shirt pocket, I spent more than an hour driving the 38 miles from my office to home. And my wife, B.J., wasn't there.

I still had not told a soul. I felt ready to burst.

B.J. arrived about 30 minutes after I got home. When I told her we won, she shrieked and acted just like one of those people on the Publishers Clearing House commercials.

Adam Gopnik, on cookbooks, gives the graf of the food issue:

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages — all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night's was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven't been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven't yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that's the game.

Metromix compiles an annotated photo gallery of all the things it loves about a classy new Chicago burger joint, DMK. Every frame is delicious.

On buns, saying something by being item #1: "Developed specifically for DMK over four months of trials, these toasty rounds, griddled up with sweet cream butter, are perfectly fitted to the 5-ounce patties."

On cocktails: [Picture of pink drink.]

On mac and cheese, with an amazing picture: "Our pick: The No. 2, gruyere and rigatoni served over a thin layer of charred balsamic-marinated onions and topped with crunchy bits of bacon."

On fries: "Our server declared the sweet potato variety with lemon-Tabasco aioli ($2) an early frontrunner, but we'd find it hard to resist ordering the parmesan-topped fries with truffle cream ($3) again." … Parmesan-topped fries with truffle cream. Tremendously distracted.

On ice cream sandwiches: [Picture of ice cream sandwich.]

Some night, sleep has to come from welcome and not just from defeat. You've heard this moment before. Or you've seen it, the moment when the crowd takes over the song, one plaintive voice becoming many, in a chorus more hope than complaint, more willful longing than anything else on your earth's face. "I still haven't found what I'm looking for…" is the moment and the song you've heard before, but until you raise your voice deep in the tens of stadium thousands or alone in your house in the middle of the night, you never realize how "still" is the right word.

In this blog's many arguments for pumpkin pie over sweet potato pie, never have I asked the preference of America — possibly because the evidence would've been too overwhelming for Randy to counter. After all, the holiday were here. But the New York Times published a slice of the country's opinion this week, and true to the surveillance journalism Randy and I helped pioneer, I can't ignore the numbers. As the Times analyzed the top 50 search terms on AllRecipes.com the day before Thanksgiving, the results were clear. America wanted a certain pie.

Screenshot:

Sweet potato casserole came first, but I've never had beef with sweet potato casserole. After pumpkin pie, did sweet potato pie come next? Only if sweet potato pie was sometimes called green bean casserole. Following on the list: pecan pie, apple pie, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, pie crust (just the crust), deviled eggs, cheesecake, mashed potatoes, pumpkin cheesecake, turkey, and then finally…

Screenshot:

It finished just ahead of mac and cheese, which I love but, let's face it, is a cute dish pajama-wearing children make all the time in minutes. If sweet potato pie wants to be taken seriously… better luck next year?