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 2/27
Countless studies have found that parents are less happy than non-parents (who, after all, are free to spend their weekends sleeping late, pursuing activities they enjoy, and having uninterrupted conversations). But American parents, it turns out, have got it particularly bad. A 2016 study found that the “happiness gap” between parents and non-parents here was […]
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 1/23
“If Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,” my 7-year-old asked me the other day, “why did he have slaves himself?” The notion that “all men are created equal” was a radical and noble idea, and it still is, if you take “men” to mean “human beings.” But back then, as I struggled to explain […]
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 […]
This Week: The mother load
The first time I met Kelly Cox, she was sitting on a green exercise ball with a baby in each arm. She bounced both babies on her knees while two moms in front of her held their yoga poses. Cox, co-owner of Bend Yoga, offers classes for moms from pregnancy to post-birth, as well as […]
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 […]
Can we have a word? Year-end doublespeak from state leaders
Three weeks ago on December 15, the Virginia Tourism Corporation awarded two contracts totaling $600,000 annually to the Martin Agency. The big dog of Richmond ad shops will be VA Tourism’s advertising agency of record. On the same day, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published allegations of sexual harassment and other workplace abuses at Martin from 17 […]
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 […]
Animal instinct: Why do we protect sexual predators?
‘‘You’re expecting too much from people,” my friend Lisa explained to me. “We’re mere animals.” I had been pacing the sidewalk rehearsing the details of the Harvey Weinstein story—at press time, following investigative reports in the New York Times and the New Yorker, more than 50 women have alleged he sexually harassed, abused and in […]