Last week, eight plaintiffs suing the city testified to the emotional harm done to them by not being able to see the statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson for 188 days, while the monuments were shrouded in tarps following the horrifying violence of Unite the Right. The tears of Monument Fund director Jock […]
It’s comforting to think that the law is the law, an impartial arbiter of right and wrong. But applying and enforcing our laws involves endless individual decisions. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania made the decision to prosecute DeAndre Harris, a teacher’s aide who worked with special education students at Venable Elementary and was brutally beaten […]
These days, when people talk about “innovation” or “entrepreneurship,” they’re often talking about tech. But the drive to experiment and create predates our digital age, of course, and it isn’t confined to code. On Friday, I had the pleasure of meeting Ivar Aass of Spirit Lab Distilling, who’s brewing single malt whiskey and other delicious […]
Charlottesville is an expensive place to live, and with a new crop of students settling in at UVA, we figured it was a good time to pull together some of our favorite deals around town. See our completely idiosyncratic list, from coffee to donuts, and add your own go-tos online. Also this week, we take […]
Though the weather still says summer, August 21 is the first day of school, and the new academic year brings some changes. Less than a year ago, a New York Times/ProPublica story shone a national spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about Charlottesville City Schools: that black students are overrepresented when it comes to suspensions and […]
When T. Denise Johnson was growing up in Charlottesville’s Westhaven neighborhood, she was one of the few black kids in her honors classes at school. Decades later, that’s a disparity that hasn’t changed—the city’s public school system has one of the widest racial achievement gaps in the nation. In both Charlottesville and Albemarle County schools, […]
Leaving aside the snipers on the roof of the historical society, the second anniversary of August 11 and 12 saw, as promised, a much lighter police presence than last year. And in the absence of checkpoints and bag searches, there was room for community events focused not just on reflecting and remembering, but on using […]
“I’m tired,” community activist Rosia Parker says in our feature this week. So many of us are. We’re two and a half years in to a presidency defined by all-caps Twitter rants and dehumanizing attacks on vulnerable people. We’re a few days past two more mass shootings, almost back-to-back, one of which was explicitly motivated […]
Whether you were on Fourth Street that afternoon or not, you know the car: the low-slung gray muscle car with the distinctive brake lights that James Fields used to murder Heather Heyer and injure dozens of others on August 12, 2017. From video footage and the shocking photograph that won local photographer Ryan Kelly a […]
Recently, we got the chance to talk with Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, and in this issue you can catch up on some of his delightfully eccentric visions . Those of us who were around in the late ’90s might remember the fanfare attendant in gathering your friends—and their CD players—in order to play all […]