Twenty years ago, Christina Ball was teaching evening Italian courses to adult continuing education students at the University of Virginia. She had come up in academic spaces, doing a Ph.D. at Yale and teaching for a while at Wake Forest before moving to Charlottesville. But as she watched the waitlists for those evening courses grow, […]
Two years ago, Brian Lindgren got hit by a car. He broke several bones, but the most important was his left pinky. Lindgren is a violist. He needs his left pinky. This was the summer of 2020, the height of the pandemic shutdown. Musicians were already struggling. Lindgren was heading into the final year of […]
Thomas Jefferson wrote only one book during his lifetime, Notes on the State of Virginia. He published it while serving as Minister to France, first anonymously in a limited private edition in 1785, then in a public edition in 1787. It’s a monumentally important work, offering a window into Jefferson’s thinking about democracy, religion, race, […]
Ralph Dammann and Ray Varona make instruments you’ve probably never heard of. Their specialty is the mandocello, a bigger, baritone version of the mandolin. But while mandocellos traditionally have four courses of paired strings, their version has five, spanning an even wider range than a guitar (from a low C, a third below the lowest […]
Kori Price is one of those rare creatures with full control over both sides of her brain. By day, she is an electrical engineer educated at Virginia Tech. In her off hours, she is a writer and mixed-media artist. In January 2022, she put on her first solo exhibition, “You can’t compromise my joy,” at […]
Joy Ting made the first barrels of her own wine in 2014. She wanted to experiment with crushing and fermenting grapes still on the stem—a technique called whole-cluster fermentation, common in Cru Beaujolais (which Ting loves) but less common in the U.S. How would it work in Virginia? Ting was still very new to the […]
Luke Ramsey learned to clean brick and de-nail old lumber as a kid. His dad would move the family into an old house that needed to be brought back to life, and they’d work on it for four or five years before moving on to the next one. “Every house I’ve ever lived in was […]