I watched the Grammys last night. Well, I watched the first hour of it anyway, which is about all I could manage. I’ve been interviewing singer-songwriters recently and have been thinking a lot about the chances they have at success in today’s music industry. There was Taylor Swift, the child bride of Nashville, former teen […]
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” So go the familiar lines of “The New Colossus,” a parochial sonnet that found its way inside the Statue of […]
I had a funny note last week from a reader named Pete, on Facebook no less, who asked me to “keep the faith,” before telling me he liked my commas. 10-4, Pete, and amen. How do my semicolons look? Pete was reacting to the Read This First (he made sure to tell me he reads […]
Rick Wasmund and Dan FitzHenry sit at a small table in a Stay Charlottesville rental house arrayed with plastic cups holding fluids of hues that range from clover honey through amber to the color of cherry juice, a natural reddish brown. You’ve heard about the surge in the craft distillery movement? Now you’re in it. […]
It is common sense. The body affects the mind; the mind affects the body. But medical science is not a field built on instinct or conjecture, and the variables that need to be isolated in order to support even the simplest causal relationships between mental and physical health are daunting. Time, perhaps, to treat the […]
Last week one of our online contributors, Jim Duncan, predicted that 2013 will be the year the real estate market turns. Jim is a Realtor with Nest Realty, so he’s not exactly a dispassionate observer, but market indicators around the country and locally are supporting his claim. Prices, at least in the residential market, are […]
There are times as a journalist that you know you’re not going to get the story. You’re going to get a story, but you’re not going to get the story. That’s how I felt going into my interview with Grandmaster Wang Fu-Lai: Taiwanese martial arts master, lineage holder of the Cheng-Ming system, and the teacher […]
We live in an editor’s world. I read that, I think, in The New York Times, and since I am an editor, it perked me up. Finally, someone telling me the world is my oyster, stars have aligned, time to make hay, stack wood, etc. When I dug into the message, though, it was somewhat […]
A new year. Time to think about time and how it slips past. A few weeks back, the subject of an interview, Elliott Woods, posed a question: How has America changed over the past decade? He was asking about how the country has changed since we went to war, but sometimes questions, like rivers, are […]
It’s a few days before the winter solstice and the temperature is 55 degrees. Guinevere Higgins—founding board member of City Schoolyard Garden and co-founder of Blue Ridge Backyard Harvest—stares down at an arugula patch that’s been flattened by Fern, one of her two dogs. “I think they actually like to nibble on it,” she says. […]