The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Not too long ago, I was sitting at a dinner table with a friend of my mother’s on her 60th birthday when she announced that she planned to live to 120. Turning 60, she said, was kind of like turning 40 used to be.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

As a 21-year-old in 1963, Dylan sang “The Times They Are a A-Changin’” with Baez from the podium during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and later in that same year, receiving a civil rights award from the ACLU a month after Kennedy was assassinated, he thumbed his nose at the progressive establishment.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

We are all acting out roles we’ve inherited, and we are all evaluated by an audience that understands us incompletely–– that’s the message Shakespeare taunts us with…

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Last week we took a bit of a beating for running an issue about the future and featuring a number of young people, all of whom happened to be white. A couple of indignant readers pointed out that painting an all-white future of this city amounts to racism, and they demanded a response from the editor.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

I usually write these columns on Monday mornings, the day we put the paper out, but because of the holiday I’m writing this one on Friday, which means it will be four days before you read it, with all of the events of the weekend between. I’m writing into the future.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

On the shortest day of the year, cultures in northern latitudes from Japan to Finland celebrate the return of light. It makes sense to recognize a thing so elemental in its absence, another paradox of human perception. Like you can’t have your cake and eat it too…

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Americans put a huge emphasis on sports. When I was 11, I missed a free throw to lose the Police Boys Club city championship game in Washington D.C. and cried my eyes out in front of 1,500 or so people.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

I knew a political operative in Chicago, since moved on to D.C., who used to get upset by the way people misunderstood and then misused O’Neill’s analect. For this guy, the advice wasn’t a warning to limit the scope of campaign messages, it was a simple reminder that to win elections, you have to start with a base at home and build out from there.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

When I was a kid growing up in D.C. in the mid-80s, there were bumper stickers around that read, “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun.” If you’ve spent any time in Northern Virginia over the past two decades, you’ll understand the futility of the position.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

This Thanksgiving, don’t forget to say thanks. No, really. Because with the planes, trains, and automobiles on Wednesday, the turkey and football on Thursday, and the dawn frenzy of Black Friday, it may be hard to get a quiet minute, much less make the connection that we are celebrating the bounty of the American continent.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Since the Pew Research Center began unveiling a series of studies on income disparities in the U.S., I’ve been reading about the death of the American Dream.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

I’ve been watching the Occupy movement with great interest. The bootstraps activism of the ‘60s is something I’ve always romanticized, on the one hand, and been haunted by, because I missed it.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

I’ve always loved the movies, but I can’t remember the first one I fell for. Was it the trippy cartoon version of The Hobbit?

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

This week’s feature is about Vaughan Wilson, a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, our war in Afghanistan, which is 10 years old this month. It’s also about the fact that a decade of war has created a generation of men and women directly affected by its costs and that, as a country, we’re really only just beginning to learn what that means.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Food is the most direct connection between necessity and art in culture. Whether you are an Oglala who prizes a salted slice of raw kidney from a fresh kill, a Basque with a taste for reconstituted salt cod in pil pil sauce, or a Virginian with specific thoughts about Surry County ham, our cuisines show how we adapt and ultimately exalt the foods that keep us alive, and in the process create a shared identity.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

I’ve led a pretty nomadic existence since my college graduation in 1997. In just under 15 years I’ve lived in 10 places––spending three months at the shortest stop, Eugene, and four years in the most permanent, Boston, where I still managed to bunk down in five different neighborhoods.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Growing up, we sang the Johnny Appleseed song before dinner. I don’t know where the tradition came from in our house. Since my mother was Catholic, I’d guess it came from my father’s side. Not that it makes a whole lot more sense theologically for Alabama Presbyterians to be singing a Swedenborgian anthem, but the hymn [...]

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

Before I moved to Charlottesville, I already had a picture in my mind of the perfect place to live. It was a university town with a balance between culture and country.

The Editor's Desk | Giles Morris

 I spent two years teaching high school English on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the way I look at the world will never be the same