Meet the mouth

Liberals like to think, conservatives like to have their opinions thrown back at them,” said cartoonist and writer Ted Rall during his speech to a packed auditorium in the Albemarle County Office Building on Wednesday, March 26. The wild cheering that followed this proclamation, however, seemed to contradict Rall’s claim. The Charlottesville Center for Peace […]

Best local coffee

After water, coffee is the world’s most popular beverage. For most, it’s also a way of life. “Long before the great coffee craze, I was born and raised in an era when it was totally natural for my family to serve us kids espresso after dinner,” says Tony LaBua, owner of the Java Hut and […]

Fishbowl

What is it good for? Protesters answer: War is good for civil action March 20, 2003, was another date, like September 11, 2001, destined for infamy. So believe those who took to Charlottesville streets on March 20, despite the downpour, as bombs rained down on Baghdad. Drenched, they marched from Downtown to UVA and back […]

UVA Inc.

They called it an incubator: the upstairs of the Charlottesville Tomorrow building on West Main Street, space leased to University faculty whose ideas no longer quite fit the contours of academia. To move into one of the six offices subsidized by UVA’s Patent Foundation signaled progress for a new biotech company. It meant that early-phase […]

The road more traveled

As area residents trickle through the open door of Charlottesville’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the words “Peace Be Within Thy Walls, Prosperity Within Thy Palaces” hang in a stately arc over the podium. The March 10 meeting, organized by the church’s pastor, Reverend Alvin Edwards, is just one in a string of reactions to the […]

Minding his business

On February 3, Albemarle County School Board member Ken Boyd announced his plans to challenge incumbent Charles Martin for the Rivanna District seat on the Board of County Supervisors. Urged by his constituents to run for a seat among the Supes, Boyd says he feels he could be of greater use to the County in […]

Fishbowl

On February 26, UVA sophomore and Student Council presidential candidate Daisy Lundy was assaulted in what police described as a possibly racially motivated attack. By that evening, a cluster of emails and outpourings about the widely reported incident had been dispatched campus-wide, including this confronting question by undergraduate Tiffany Chatman: “Still think racism doesn’t exist […]

Take a Message

Since the first cave dwellers plunked a rock against a wall for purely expressive reasons, music has been social—even sometimes political. Like any art form, music offers an individual’s take on the surrounding world, one that is in turn absorbed and cast back into the world by an audience. Every song, no matter the subject, […]

What they don’t tell us

One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they’ve learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What’s going on abroad? What’s going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs? News is a component of infrastructure […]

For the record

The first sign of change at Spencer’s 206 is the pert display of DVDs at the register. They’re the right kind of DVDs, of course—Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, the Heads’ Stop Making Sense—but they signal the sort of infusion of new merchandise that says “reinvestment.” Then there’s the tidier aspect of the Water Street shop—actual […]