My favorite section of the Rivanna Trail is a cul de sac. Bordered by razor wire on one side and a road on the other, it forms a looped pocket trail near the confluence of Meadow Creek and the Rivanna River.
Letters to the editor: The birth of an entrepreneur
In a speech at the Sorbonne in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles…"
Editor's Note: Graduation day
“What am I supposed to do, Giles? I mean, words don’t mean anything anymore,” a friend of mine told me at The Whiskey Jar one day after work, somewhere near her wit’s end.
Electric Tuesdays
05/21/2013 8:00 pm Electric Tuesdays The Hot Spot, Waynesboro VA
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Editor's note: Reading history through colored glasses
History. His Story. history. We can only ever see the past through the convex lens of the present, one of the truths of epistemology and existence, that, to be frank, is too often ignored.
Editor's Note: Farms and food
“‘Organic’ has become a label, as it was destined to be. It’s a completely worthless word now. It has been perverted to suit the needs of industrial agriculture.” That from Wendell Berry, one of the fathers of the movement, in a 2008 interview.
Editor's Note: Working women and the gender gap
I had a working mother, but as a kid I mostly thought of my mom in terms of what she did (or did not do) when I was around her.
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Editor's note: Health care and James Madison
“As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves,” so says James Madison…
Readers respond to previous issues
Closing the gap When Rose Atkins came to Charlottesville, she was surprised to see so many people in her office. She came from a place that had a lot more children than Charlottesville and was surprised to see the number of secretaries and workers in her office. So we could start there in eliminating some [...]
Editor's Note: Rites of spring
It rained most of the weekend, but the soft, gray light only amplified the color in the new green leaves that are pushing out from the tips of the fruit tree boughs.
Editor's Note: Hip Hop Hooray
I’ve mentioned before in this column that I grew up listening to hip-hop, which is something that characterizes my generational cohort. I remember hearing rap for the first time at summer camp in 1986 as an 11-year-old (“Girls Just Don’t Understand” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince) and getting hooked on the form at school a year later (Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back).
Editor's Note: Remembering things past
Those words are part of Marcel Proust’s famous description his encounter with a madeleine cookie from Remembrance of Things Past and crystallize his notion of ‘involuntary memory,’ a concept that made it all the way from his literature into the canon of modern psychology.
Mailbag: Belmont Bridge and McIntire Park East planning
Is it Opposite Day? One entry in the Belmont Bridge Design Competition [“Bridge Builders,” February 14] took all the top awards. But, it designed no bridge. Here’s why.
The Belmont Bridge was falling down. We needed a solution.
Editor's Note: The take away game
For the first time in weeks, my bike ride to work through Court Square didn’t take me past a row of satellite trucks. The Huguely trial is over and the verdict is in. In this week’s issue, J. Tobias Beard takes a crack at answering the question he set out to explore when he began his coverage: Why did we watch this particular tragedy so closely, when there are so many others playing out around us right now?
Editor's Note: Living in little, big town
I’m still relatively new to town. Most of the week I sit at a computer, like a carp sifting passively through a river of news and information, so I need weekends like this last one to remind me why I came here in the first place.
Editor's note: Big ideas make big conversations
There’s a big trial happening up the street, a so-called media event, but life is still going on all around us. It makes you stop and think a little bit about what the news is. Should we write stories because we know people will read them or because they won’t ever get read unless we write them?
Editor's note: Wave your freak flag
We were standing in the Boston Common by the Park Street subway stop on a Saturday, and my friend, an old hippie, looked out at the green hill sloping up towards the State House and said, “I remember when you’d look up there and see people getting it on under blankets.”
Letter to the Editor: Political Science
Brendan Fitzgerald’s article “Does anyone trust science anymore?” January 24, melds half-truths, undefined terminology, and under-critical reporting. The initial quote of Michael Mann, “hopefully every scientist…is a skeptic,” was hopeful. The next sentence has Mann revealing his own muddled bias as he elevates consensus to scientific fact, and then re-labels skepticism as denial.
Editor's Note: The new life cycle
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.
Editor's Note: Bringin' it all back home
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.
Editor's Note: All the world's a stage
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…
Editor's Note: Passing the torch
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.
Editor's Note: In the bleak midwinter
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…