Characters

Homeowners across the city could see their property rights altered by the first zoning code overhaul in more than 40 years. City officials said the sweeping revisions, dubbed Transform Baltimore, would preserve the character of neighborhoods and make it easier for homes to be modernized. "If your zoning is changing, it doesn't necessarily mean your neighborhood is going to change," said Tom Stosur, Baltimore's director of planning. Stosur and his staff, who spent the past four years writing and rewriting the proposed code, want to assure people that the changes would not allow businesses to spring up in the middle of tree-filled blocks of single-family homes.

What makes a great workplace? A bit of Old Fezziwig. That's a reference to one of the characters from Dickens' novella, "A Christmas Carol" - the corpulent, jolly man who ran the London business where Ebenezer Scrooge apprenticed. Fezziwig threw the original office party, and he invited everyone to celebrate the holiday. But that's not why people loved him, and the office party isn't what makes a great workplace. There was more to Fezziwig than fiddle and ale. Generous, affable and wise, he was a merchant with compassion, an ethical businessman who cared as much about his community as his profit margins, his workers as much as customers.

It might have been a much more tense conversation: Carrie confronts Mike about his continued meddling in the CIA's terror investigation. She knows all about where he's been snooping. She even knows about the affair with his best friend's wife. That friend, of course, is Brody. And, you know, Brody and Carrie have something of a romantic entanglement themselves. Carrie opts for an emotional appeal, asking Mike to step back for the good of the woman he cares about, and he agrees. It's not easy to let go, she says, “not when you've chosen someone.” So whose relationship was the subject of this conversation again?

Last fall, FX's "American Horror Story" burst onto the scene as one of television's best drama miniseries and was nominated for 17 Emmy Awards . This season, co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk flipped the script by changing characters, plotlines and the show's setting from the “Murder House” to the dank and chilling Briarcliff Manor mental asylum. Over the next few weeks b will post Q&As with cast members of "American Horror Story. " So far, we've talked with Chloe Sevigny and Evan Peters . This time we caught up with Sarah Paulson.

CM Punk has been on a campaign for respect. The on-screen character has lambasted WWE at every turn for giving priority treatment to other superstars instead of the reigning WWE champion. This week, though, it's hard to argue that Punk had the spotlight that a champion deserves. He was featured in the main event of Raw in a tag team match, was part of the centerpiece attraction of the debut episode of Main Event on Wednesday and main evented tonight's Smackdown in a match against Dolph Ziggler.

Like many people I know, I am planning on voting against Question 6 this November, the amendment to Maryland law that would fundamentally change the definition of marriage in our state. I am planning on doing so because I believe marriage is a special relationship that biology, human history and our identities as man or woman tell us is reserved for one man and one woman. I believe this without animosity or hatred, but instead with a desire to protect that sacred institution in which I was raised, and in which I now live out my calling as husband and father.

Can 3-year-olds learn online? Susan Magsamen believes they can, with moderation and careful monitoring by a mentor or parent. And she's building a company to prove it. Last month, Magsamen launched Curiosityville.com , a company that focuses on online learning for children ages 3 to 8. The Cockeysville company has raised $2.3 million from investors and has struck several partnerships with some major children's learning brands, including National...

Expecting the usual entertaining evening delivered by talented players at Toby's Dinner Theatre of Columbia, I found instead a life-affirming, near-religious experience at "The Color Purple" - a musical epic tracing a black woman's journey from abject subjugation in youth to achieving in maturity love, power and nobility. Adapted from Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg's film, the musical follows Celie, from a poor girl in 1911 Georgia, at age 14 in her second pregnancy resulting from rape by her father, through her struggles until maturity.

One hundred fifty years ago today, two great armies clashed in a titanic struggle that would decide the fate of a nation. "Around a cornfield and a little white Dunker church, around a stone bridge and in a pasture lane worn by cow paths, surged a human tornado," wrote Carl Sandburg many years later. Never before or since has such a deadly concentration of firepower been unleashed on the American continent. The Battle of Antietam, waged across a meandering stream called Antietam Creek in Western Maryland near Hagerstown, was the first great turning point of the American Civil War and the bloodiest single day of combat ever waged on U.S. soil.