Sunday night, I watched a documentary called “Mariachi High,” which follows the fortunes of the mariachi ensemble at Zapata High School in a sleepy Rio Grande border town in Texas. The film is, more than anything else, about how a music teacher with a passion for tradition has created a reason for high school kids […]
As humans, it’s hard for us to know with any sense of certainty where we are in history. The narrative ribbon that connects age to age is knitted with intergenerational strands that are longer than our lifetimes. But there are moments, ripples in our collective fabric, in which societies advertise their own watersheds. Think about […]
When I was 9 or 10, I was asked, by a member of the foreign press corps attending one of my parents’ cocktail parties, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I answered that I wanted to be a lobbyist, which provoked laughter first, and then puzzled amusement. Why on earth would I […]
You can never go home again. The line expresses a quintessential sorrow embedded in the American dream. You move up and out. You can’t go home again, because you left and became someone different. When you go back, no one will understand you, and the place you idealized can’t ever live up to the new […]
UVA employs almost 15,000 people and another 20,000 are enrolled there as students. Of the people who move to Charlottesville for work, nearly every one of them has some connection to the University. The “town and gown” relationship is a false dichotomy left over from a time when being from town meant your social caste […]
There aren’t many things you can’t learn in school. You can learn to be a poet or a cake baker, a philosopher or an engineer, a composer or a chemist, a carpenter or a priest. But, in spite of Jack Black’s best efforts, you can’t learn to be a rock star. There’s irony, I think, […]
The Dow Jones broke records and the unemployment rate found its way to a five-year low last week. Look around and you can tell the construction industry is perking up. Roofs are coming off and going back on all over town. Site prep is moving forward on some major development projects. “Under contract” signs are […]
In the beginning, the city’s visual arts community had two centers, Second Street Gallery and the McGuffey Art Center. The acropolis and the agora. The gallery was a place to recognize inspiration, to elevate its status through the ceremony of formal exhibition. The center was a pure democracy in an old schoolhouse, a rabbit’s warren […]
This past Saturday at the Savannah Book Festival, I listened to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. talk about his new book Freeman, the story of a freed slave tracking down his wife after the Civil War. During the Q&A, in an auditorium mostly filled with middle-aged white women, the conversation turned to the subject […]
I watched the Grammys last night. Well, I watched the first hour of it anyway, which is about all I could manage. I’ve been interviewing singer-songwriters recently and have been thinking a lot about the chances they have at success in today’s music industry. There was Taylor Swift, the child bride of Nashville, former teen […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]