Editor’s Note: We are living in an editorial world, and I am an…
We live in an editor’s world. I read that, I think, in The New York Times, and since I am an editor, it perked me up. Finally, someone telling me the world is my oyster, stars have aligned, time to make hay, stack wood, etc. When I dug into the message, though, it was somewhat [...]
Editor’s Note: War, gun violence, and the New Year
A new year. Time to think about time and how it slips past. A few weeks back, the subject of an interview, Elliott Woods, posed a question: How has America changed over the past decade? He was asking about how the country has changed since we went to war, but sometimes questions, like rivers, are [...]
Guinevere Higgins wants to help you grow food in your backyard
It’s a few days before the winter solstice and the temperature is 55 degrees. Guinevere Higgins—founding board member of City Schoolyard Garden and co-founder of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest—stares down at an arugula patch that’s been flattened by Fern, one of her two dogs. “I think they actually like to nibble on it,” she says. [...]
Editor’s Note: War and the culture of violence
As we make final preparations for the holidays, 68,000 U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan. On Christmas Day, some might get a decent meal and a little booze at a base where they can Facebook relatives; others will be stuck in inhospitable outposts littering the remote countryside. They’ll wake up, in the morning or evening, [...]
Portraits of war: Elliott Woods wants Americans to look their returning veterans in the eye
Elliott Woods grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the son of a Navy doctor. He attended a prestigious Catholic boys’ school in Bethesda, a Washington, D.C. suburb dotted with exclusive country clubs and peopled by physicians, lawyers, and deal makers. A self-described “rambunctious kid who had some disciplinary problems,” Woods was forced to withdraw from high [...]
Editor’s Note: Charlottesville’s charming music video
Charlottesville’s not charming anymore, and it’s partly my fault. You take a college party town in close enough proximity to a major metro area to attract venture capital, weekend homes, bohemians, and commuters, and sooner or later the kinetic energy between the scene and the U turns the place from quaint to charming. Word starts [...]
Editor’s Note: Hunger is a powerful metaphor
Americans are hungry. We work more hours per week than our counterparts in Europe and we eat more, too. Charlottesville has over 370 restaurants and a grocery store for every palate. We have no staple food, culturally; the cornucopia is our defining principle. Stay hungry out there, a pee wee football coach might say. Eat [...]
Downtown Busk Break: Les Grosses Erreurs of Lafayette, Louisiana
(VIDEO) You might have seen the members of Les Grosses Erreurs (The Big Mistakes) on the Downtown Mall over the past few days. The Cajun musicians are in Charlottesville from Lafayette, Louisiana, after a stop in Asheville. They’ll be busking and playing house shows until Monday. Here they play “I have a broken heart.” For [...]
Editor’s Note: Passing knowledge across generations means facing death together
There are a number of ways to indicate that the population is aging, but perhaps the most relevant is that the U.S. Census Bureau projects the dependency ratio —the number of people age 65 and older for every 100 people of traditional working age—will go from 22 in 2010 to 35 in 2030. In simplest [...]
Long journey home: A family’s experience with hospice care
Chronic heart disease and cancer are by far the top killers of American adults, and together with lung disease account for more than half of adult deaths each year, according to recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the population continues to age, the money the government spends on health care is disproportionately focused on patients at the end of their lives.
Editor’s Note: You’re buying local: a ‘thank you’ to our advertisers
Buy local. Buy local. Buy local. You’ve been hearing it for years, and it’s starting to become like the Salvation Army bell ringer, something you ignore politely, with a pang of guilt that doesn’t linger past the first or second traffic light. About the time it takes to get through the rationale that it’s not [...]
Editor’s Note: Dems celebrate demographic shift, hail rebirth of populism
Even though apparently every Democrat was reading Nate Silver and knew exactly how the election would pan out, I witnessed a significant sense of relief last Wednesday, and then watched the euphoria build as political analysts unpacked the message President Obama’s victory sent: Republicans cannot continue to be the party of angry white men and [...]
Professor Apple: How Tom Burford sowed the seeds of the Virginia hard cider revival
It is tempting to imagine that the resurgence of Virginia hard cider had its genesis in a single moment: Monticello’s Director of Gardens and Grounds Peter Hatch and Virginia gentleman Tom Burford kneeling together with their grafting knives to re-propagate the Virginia Hewe’s Crab apple tree in Thomas Jefferson’s north orchard.
UVA Women’s Soccer enters NCAA tournament play on a goal-scoring tear
After a troubling mid-season lull during which the UVA women’s soccer team dropped three games from five by one-goal margins, Coach Steve Swanson’s Cavaliers have gone on a tear, outscoring opponents 19-3 over a five game run. Virginia claimed the ACC Tournament championship with a 4-0 demolition of Maryland this past Sunday and begins its [...]
Editor’s Note: In search of Abraham Lincoln on Election Day
“This year’s presidential election campaign shapes up as just about the emptiest and the most depressing in living memory,” wrote Tony Thomas, former American business editor of The Economist, in a recent essay about American culture for Contemporary Review, a quarterly magazine that has published continuously from Oxford since 1866. Thomas’ piece is really about [...]
Shooting Lincoln: How local talent and the Virginia film industry made Spielberg’s blockbuster possible
Lincoln never would have been made without the 200 block of East Main Street in Charlottesville. It may sound like gross hyperbole, but it’s true in a very mundane and specific kind of way. Because Erica Arvold—film producer, casting director, and acting advocate—has her office in a building there, and she was responsible for hundreds [...]
Local filmmaker takes on the civil rights struggle from a foreign perspective
Eduardo Montes-Bradley drove nearly 50,000 miles up and down the East Coast with his family, searching for a place to put down roots. The Argentine-born filmmaker settled on Charlottesville for a variety of reasons—the University, the proximity to mountain and ocean, and the public schools. “There was a series of factors but the most important [...]
Editor’s Note: In a town this size, there is no place to hide
I’ve had a couple encounters in the past week with what friend and sometime contributor Jim Barns likes to call the small town department. When I first moved here for the job and wrote something that piqued his interest, Jim would write to me from the small town department and explain the connection between two [...]
Local Food Hub celebrates impact on regional foodshed with Community Food Awards
“I’m kind of doing it Jefferson-style. I will die deeply in debt and someone else will have my land,” said a triumphant Michael Clark to an audience seated in the loading dock of the Local Food Hub’s Ivy distribution facility last Thursday.
Editor’s Note: On the death of liberal populism
Josh Garrett-Davis, a young author and historian who read at The Bridge/ PAI last week, wrote a kind of personal eulogy for George McGovern that ran in the New York Times Monday and that could have been titled “Lefty’s Lament: The death of liberal populism.” Garrett-Davis grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to hippie [...]
Fantastic Fox’s Café: Charlottesville’s last bastion of country cooking
In an era when most restaurants are going to great lengths to stand out, Fox’s Cafe blends in. Situated in a parking lot on Avon Street at the edge of Belmont, the local diner is a throwback. For a fair price, you can get country biscuits ‘n’ gravy, or eggs over easy with corned beef [...]
Who brought the Asian food to Charlottesville?
Life’s patterns seem almost geometrical at times. When I was a kid my family went, for special occasions, to a Japanese restaurant on a quiet stretch of Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the working entrance of the Japanese Embassy. The Mikado was a typical Japanese restaurant of its time, impossibly formal with [...]
Japanese nationals turn to chef Ted Nogami of Miyako for flavors of home
Food is the best cure for homesickness. Whether the instinct is Pavlovian or Proustian, the simple smell of a childhood dish can transport you around the world. Japanese nationals in Charlottesville, 6,000 miles away from their island culture, can take a plane ride to New York City, where the East Village has turned into a [...]
Editor’s Note: City Council was wrong on Black Market Moto Saloon decision
There is a difference between comprehensive planning and comprehensive reasoning, but they share the same oxymoronic nature. Last week the City Council voted not to grant Matteus Frankovich and the Black Market Moto Saloon the special use permit the business needs to host live music, saying it was not part of the city’s comprehensive plan for [...]
‘Naive is the new cynical’ and other generational musings
As a Cold War baby, though, I mistrust the notion of resistance in our well-lubricated world. Sooner or later, everyone wants a taste of the good life. I guess that’s the understated requiem for American counterculture composed by our Boomer forefathers and -mothers.
Soccer is still a passport to world culture, but it’s also an American game
Before I fell in love with America, I fell in love with the rest of the world. I guess it had to do with growing up in Washington, D.C., a place full of people from everywhere else. I memorized the flags that hung outside the sandstone townhouses on Embassy Row. Hey mom, where’s Equatorial Guinea? [...]
Fresh off a World Cup win, UVA’s Steve Swanson and Morgan Brian eye ACC and NCAA titles
When University of North Carolina standout Kealia Ohai scored the game-winning goal in the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup earlier this month in Tokyo, UVA’s Morgan Brian was one step behind her. She had followed the play from midfield and arrived at the right time. The goal could have been hers, but it fell to [...]