It’s a very Charlottesville story: Megan Read first saw Michael Fitts’ work hanging in the Mudhouse when she was 16, and just learning to paint. “Holy shit—that’s what I want to do!” she recalls thinking. Years later, her own work was displayed there, and Fitts saw her piece “Resistance/Resilience” as he got his morning coffee […]
This Week, 3/27
Last Wednesday evening, as former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu was telling a sold-out book festival crowd that the backlash against removing Confederate monuments was “not about the statutes,” and that white supremacists were “having a field day” under President Trump, Charlottesville police were investigating a threat posted on 4chan, by someone using the Pepe […]
A moral map: The city budget is a chance to show what matters to us
It’s budget season. For four months every year, council and staff hold public meetings about the coming year’s priorities. For four months, I sit through what I am absolutely certain is the exact same PowerPoint at least a dozen times. Much of it remains inscrutable to me. I am growing comfortable with the idea that […]
This week, 3/20
Last week, we wrote about Detroit-based letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. If you’ve been to the Mudhouse lately, or a dozen other spots around town, you’ve seen his work: the brightly colored posters with stylized “words of wisdom” chosen by community members (e.g., “If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”). Kennedy, who […]
For the record: How a ‘strange hobby’ became a public service
I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at […]
This Week: 3/13
A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since December 2017. In this issue, Conger, in the first of what […]
This Week, 3/6
Last week, Albemarle County Schools superintendent Matt Haas declared a ban on Confederate, Nazi, and other imagery associated with “white supremacy, racial hatred, or violence” from the school system’s dress code. A few days later, the city quietly celebrated Liberation and Freedom Day, which City Council established just two years ago, to commemorate the arrival […]
This Week 2/20
In 1986, a young lawyer and UVA grad named Rick Middleton left his job at a national environmental nonprofit in D.C. and moved to Charlottesville. With two other lawyers, a three-year grant, and a small office on the Downtown Mall, he established the first environmental advocacy organization focused on the South, determined to use the […]
This Week 2/13
A 75th wedding anniversary is so rare that the U.S. Census Bureau keeps no statistics on it, Mary Jane Gore tells us. Estimates are that fewer than 0.1 percent of marriages make it to 70 years or more. So this Valentine’s Day week, we tell you about Bill and Shirley Stanton of Afton, who celebrated […]
This Week 2/6
February is Black History Month, a time when schools across the country dutifully trot out lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. In 2015, a minor firestorm ensued when Orange County High School students connected the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter movement in a school performance, and an […]
This Week 1/30
The tail end of January can be a tough time of year. It’s cold and gray. The rush of holidays is over, with nothing looming on the horizon except the questionable occasion of Valentine’s Day. Spring seems ages away. While you may deal with this turn of events like me (read: wearing out your new […]
This Week, 1/16
Nearly four weeks in, the federal government remains at a standstill over the president’s maniacal demand for $5.7 billion in American taxpayers’ dollars to erect a giant wall. But local government, at least, is raring to go. “Eighty percent of what we do is not a Republican or Democratic issue,” Republican Delegate Steve Landes tells […]
This Week 1/9
Start reading about the opioid epidemic, and there’s no shortage of staggering statistics. Drug overdose has become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for those under 50, surpassing deaths from firearms, car accidents, homicides, or HIV/AIDS. In 2017, the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high—70,237, more Americans […]
This Week: 1/2
Although technology may, overall, be destroying our collective attention span, the internet has also brought us new ways of telling stories. And the startling popularity of podcasts is proof that many of us are still hungry for a slower kind of media, one that pauses to examine the esoteric, interesting, and complex stories that don’t […]
This Week 12/26
Before we turn the page on 2018, another tumultuous year, this issue takes a look back at what grabbed our attention over the last 12 months. Like the year itself, this is a somewhat incongruous mix, with the A/12 anniversary lockdown jostling against MarieBette’s insanely good “prezzant”(a pretzel croissant) and the great music, art, and theater that […]
This Week: 12/19
Among the many Christmas rituals going on at this time of year is the Mexican tradition of las posadas (literally, “the inns”), which commemorates Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter in Bethlehem. In the nine nights leading up to Christmas, families, friends, and neighbors go on a candlelight procession, knocking on doors and asking for […]
History matters: ‘Something wicked this way comes’
By Bonnie Gordon For almost two years, Charlottesville has felt like Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth. So when I saw Black Mac, a radically black take on Shakespeare’s play about the violent hauntings of the past, it felt like a staging of collective memory, trauma, power, and space. Directed by 23-year-old black Oberlin student […]
Berlin, 1933. Charlottesville, 2017
By Herbert Braun I’m tired. I live in our town, this partly bucolic mid-sized college town. I ride my bicycle to work, three miles down Rugby Road, on lovely tree-lined streets, courteous drivers sharing the road with me. And on many days I can just stay home and work. I read books and articles, do […]
Opinion: White, well meaning: United Way should reflect the community it serves
By Sean Lyons The impending retirement of Cathy Train, the long-time president of the United Way of the Thomas Jefferson Area, presents an important opportunity for one of the region’s most prominent philanthropies to better meet the needs of the community and embody what it claims is one of its core values: striving to be […]
A-list: Virginia’s GOP legislators stay NRA strong
It’s disappointing that the Virginia legislature didn’t see fit to advance even a sliver of new restrictions on guns, militias and racist, reactionary mayhem during the current session. Not a single bill drafted in response to August 12 made it through for consideration in the other chamber, nor did some 60 gun control-related bills. Plainly, […]
Power to the people: Getting off on the hero myth
“Catnip for reporters.” That’s how Metallica fan and Democratic newcomer Danica Roem described her winning campaign in Virginia’s 13th District last November. She is, after all, the transgender woman who defeated the anti-LGBT incumbent Bob Marshall. Nevermind that her platform was all about lines of stalled traffic and not lines outside bathroom stalls. The simple […]
Pussy riot: Women find their voice. Get used to it.
The high-profile sexual harassment cases continue to pile up and I’m reminded of the Emerson String Quartet. The world-renowned musicians can hold audiences rapt with the passion and delicacy of their playing. And yet without fail, when they rest their bows between movements the concert hall will erupt in a chorus of coughing and sputtering […]
Letters to the editor: Week of November 15-21
Letters to the editor Childish board behavior to blame The article “Secret history: Is the Charlottesville historical society a thing of the past?” [October 25-31] by John Last should have been on the opinion(ated) page as it does not qualify as a news article. Starting off the article by referring to Steven Meeks as an […]