For the past three years, I have pictured you out there, The Reader, and written these weekly letters to you (this being the last one, I promise), even though I know they can’t possibly get through, since you aren’t you at all, but many, many people going about the business of life in this locality […]
It’s kind of a cliché that any media person who comes to town has his eyes fixed on the Rotunda and the Mountain first. Apart from the novelty and force of Jefferson’s attraction, there’s the instinct that you’ve got to understand how Monticello and the University work before you get the rest of the place. […]
This job brought me to town. I remember the process of circulating my resume three years ago, starting in early spring, a good time for changes, and winding up in an hour-long phone conversation with Frank Dubec, C-VILLE’s publisher at the time. It’s a six-hour drive from North Carolina’s Tuckasegee River valley to Charlottesville and […]
I first encountered the om prayer in the pages of Rudyard Kipling’s British Colonial picaresque novel, Kim, in which the protagonist teams up with a wise and seemingly guileless Tibetan monk to foil Russian gun runners in the Khyber Pass. Apart from being a writer with Dickens’ touch in depicting the varieties in language and […]
“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . .” read Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, handed down lo these 60 years. It was the beginning of the end for […]
I am sure I’ve been guilty of searching for metaphors where there were none. Whenever I’ve been around scientists for a prolonged period of time, I’ve been told as much. Sometimes the weather is just the weather. But I can’t help thinking that our obsession with storms speaks to some larger force—not climate change, though […]
I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public […]
What does an artist need? A clean, well-lit place? Genius? A tortured soul? Or is the answer less poetic? Cheap rent, time to spare, and a bit of pocket money. Does an artist need theory, training, and genius underneath it all? Or will his art spring like a geyser from the darkest, deepest place in […]
You might have noticed there’s a little tag on the front of our newspaper commemorating 25 years in business. Our company started in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War and the dawning of the age of global capital and ethnic conflict. Cultural barriers, concrete and abstract, […]
When we publish our food listings magazine, Bites + Sites, the restaurant categories are always a bit of a conundrum. What do you do with a Russian-Turkish bakery or a French-owned restaurant that serves Virginia food or an Algerian-Mediterranean fusion joint or a Nepali-Indian place? When I was growing up in the ’80s, the Cold […]