“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” So go the familiar lines of “The New Colossus,” a parochial sonnet that found its way inside the Statue of […]
I had a funny note last week from a reader named Pete, on Facebook no less, who asked me to “keep the faith,” before telling me he liked my commas. 10-4, Pete, and amen. How do my semicolons look? Pete was reacting to the Read This First (he made sure to tell me he reads […]
It is common sense. The body affects the mind; the mind affects the body. But medical science is not a field built on instinct or conjecture, and the variables that need to be isolated in order to support even the simplest causal relationships between mental and physical health are daunting. Time, perhaps, to treat the […]
Last week one of our online contributors, Jim Duncan, predicted that 2013 will be the year the real estate market turns. Jim is a Realtor with Nest Realty, so he’s not exactly a dispassionate observer, but market indicators around the country and locally are supporting his claim. Prices, at least in the residential market, are […]
Line of fire News is finally getting out of the controversial decision by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission to build an open air police firing range at the old Keene Landfill in southern Albemarle [“Albemarle County approves new police training facility despite neighborhood opposition,” November 13]. The Board, with the persistence […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve read and reread your article about Charlottesville’s gay community [“Before out was in,” November 13], and I was deeply moved. The background work you did for the article and the thought you put into its construction were simply superb. I know the wider community needs to read it and I hope it has the impact on many that it had on me.
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 […]
Read more Jen Sorensen comics at her website slowpokecomics.com.
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
The Dragas-gate scandal and its tight-lipped aftermath shifted attention away from the fact that UVA President Teresa Sullivan was brought in as a fixer. A scholar with an impeccable resume and serious administrative chops armed with experience at two massive and successful state universities, Texas and Michigan, was tapped to lead a small, prestigious public […]
The heat finally broke. I watched the national weather radar on Saturday as a giant green-yellow-orange-red band of storms the size of the country swept from left to right at the front of a high pressure system, erasing months of sticky heat like an Etch A Sketch. On my run that morning, I stepped around […]
According to the Albemarle County Police Department, our co-worker and friend, Elizabeth Walton, was killed in an apparent murder-suicide around 11:45pm on Tuesday, August 28, at her home in the 3800 block of Stony Point Road. Also killed were her children: Noah Philip Romando, Lily Catherine Romando, and Andrew Ross Romando. According to the police, […]
The poison and the antidote were anciently understood to be of the same substance, so that the word pharmakon was used in Greek to name both toxin and treatment. The Asclepian medical symbol employs the image of the snake, a reminder of the principle underlying healing practices, which administer little deaths to preserve life. Inoculation […]