Izzy Guimaraes says she and her husband, Sid Luthra, are “big nerds” who do the crossword every day in The New York Times. So when planning their spring 2023 wedding (featured in the January/February 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine), it seemed fitting to create a large personalized crossword puzzle to entertain their guests. “It was a really fun thing for people to get to know each other as they discussed the clues,” says Guimaraes, 34, a University of Maryland alum who lives in North Potomac. Their photographer’s Instagram post of the puzzle has racked up 2.7 million views. Guimaraes launched WedWords (wed-words.com) in January. She designs and sells custom dry-erase crosswords, partnering with a commercial printer to produce and ship the large acrylic puzzles. “I’ve enjoyed seeing how much this resonated with other people,” says Guimaraes, whose day job is operating the test prep company Wheelhouse Learning.
After writing two books on relationships, Julie and David Bulitt now have a podcast called Conversations for Couples. David, 63, a divorce attorney, likes to be organized and serve as the moderator, says his wife, Julie, 59, a family therapist who describes herself as more off the cuff during the recording sessions in their Olney home. They offer professional advice and personal insights from their 37 years of marriage on topics from fighting fair to how to keep the spark going. The podcast, which also can be viewed on YouTube, first dropped in January, and episodes are released every other week.
As a reporter at The Washington Post, Craig Whitlock wrote more than 50 stories about a corruption scandal involving several U.S. Navy officers and Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian defense contractor. The 56-year-old journalist, who lives in Silver Spring, expanded the investigation and says he exposes vulnerabilities the military has yet to come to grips with in his book Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy (Simon & Schuster, May 2024). “He was almost an evil genius in how he was able to cultivate Navy officers to be his moles, informants and give him classified information,” Whitlock says of Francis. “It’s a real gripping tale of espionage, of sex, of bribery and misconduct.”
New parents sometimes struggle to know which toys to buy their baby—and many are short on time to figure it out. The answer, according to Bethesda mom Sarah Breitenother, is a toy subscription service. In April, she rolled out Little Bloomer (littlebloomer.com), a business that delivers boxes of age-appropriate toys to customers every three months. “We take the guesswork out of what toys to buy your baby,” says Breitenother, 38, who has a background in marketing and consulted with an early childhood education expert in selecting the toys. Subscriptions come with an app for parents to learn how to best play with their kids at different developmental stages.
Brody and Luke Mullins are from Upper Northwest Washington, D.C., attended Gonzaga College High School, and still live near where they grew up. Both became journalists, and now the brothers are co-authors of The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government (Simon & Schuster, May 2024). Brody, 49, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, came up with the idea and enlisted Luke, 46, a contributing writer at Politico. They devoted seven years to the project. The hope, Luke says, was to show how the lobbying industry has changed through examples and characters that make the book read more like a novel. “Our goal was to really explain how we got here, and how the lobbying industry affects you as a consumer in ways you probably don’t always understand,” he says.
Katie Ledecky, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May, often is asked about the secret to being a world-class swimmer. Her book, Just Add Water (Simon & Schuster, June 2024), is an attempt to lay out the ingredients of her swimming life, crediting her family, coaches and beloved Palisades Swim & Tennis Club community in Cabin John for contributing to her success. “You are who you are in the moment only because of all the moments that came before it,” writes Ledecky, 27, who grew up in Bethesda and graduated from Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. After her sixth consecutive women’s 800-meter freestyle win at the world championships in July 2023, Ledecky took a weeklong break and then began training for the Paris Olympics with a swim at Palisades. “It fills me with pride and emotion just thinking about it,” she writes about that early morning workout in the hometown pool where she learned to swim. Ledecky has 10 Olympic medals, including seven golds.
The filmmaking career of 26-year-old Natalie Jasmine Harris, who grew up in Silver Spring and now lives in New York, is taking off. Her short film, Grace, debuted at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The story is about a young Black queer girl coming of age in the 1950s in the South as she confronts issues of identity that conflict with her religious traditions. Harris, a graduate of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in film and television, wrote, directed and produced the film.
Olympic Hopefuls
Many athletes with Montgomery County roots are aiming to make it to the 2024 Paris Olympics. Decisions on who will go to the July/August Games run into the summer. In addition to Ledecky, here are a few vying for spots:
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the July/August 2024 print issue of Bethesda Magazine. For the most up-to-date news on these Olympic hopefuls, read the online article from July 1 here.
Kayla DiCello has been training at Hill’s Gymnastics in Gaithersburg since she was 2 years old. The elite gymnast took a gap year from the University of Florida for the 2023-2024 school year and returned to her home gym to prepare for her shot at the Olympics. She hopes to land one of five spots on the U.S. gymnastics team in late June. “I have been dreaming about making the Olympics, making the team and being able to compete,” says DiCello, 20, who placed third at the U.S. championships in early June.
DiCello is a six-time U.S. national team member. She won the all-around bronze at the 2021 world championships and all-around gold at the 2023 Pan American Games. After being named 2023 Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year at the University of Florida, DiCello says she considered training on campus but decided she’d be able to focus most effectively from her home in Boyds. She’s living with her family and asked her longtime coach, Kelli Hill, to come out of retirement and work with her. “I’ve gotten so much support from Montgomery County—my family and friends in my neighborhood,” says DiCello, who attended Northwest High School in Germantown. “This probably wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for my principal helping me come up with a schedule so I could balance practicing twice a day with also still going to public school.”
Track standout Quincy Wilson, who lives in Gaithersburg, qualified this spring for the Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon. He beat the indoor national record with a time of 45.76 in the 400-meter dash in March at the New Balance Nationals Indoor in Boston. Quincy clocked 45.19 at the Florida Relays in late March and did even better at the East Coast International Showcase in May with a time of 45.17.
Helen Maroulis,a graduate of Col. Zadok Magruder High School in Rockville, has qualified for the Paris Games where she hopes to bring home more hardware. The two-time Olympic medalist won gold in women’s freestyle wrestling at the 2016 and 2020 Games. She qualified for the 2024 team in April. At 32, she will be the oldest U.S. woman to wrestle in the Games and the only American female wrestler to compete in three Olympics.
Alumni from Bethesda’s Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart Phoebe Bacon (class of 2020) and Erin Gemmell (class of 2023) will be competing for spots on the U.S. Olympic swimming team in mid-June. Bacon, 21, is a standout swimmer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Gemmell, 19, is on the team at University of Texas at Austin.
This story appears in the July/August edition of Bethesda Magazine.
