In five years of living in Charlottesville, I had taken the bus exactly once—as an outing for my then-3-year-old, who loved riding the bus back in Brooklyn. Even once I started working on the Mall, it didn’t occur to me to commute by bus. The closest line to my house runs only once an hour, […]
News that no one wants you to know about notoriously drops on Friday afternoons, when reporters and readers are already looking ahead to the weekend. Coincidentally or not, it was Friday afternoon when the City of Charlottesville sent its bizarre press release about the Civilian Review Board, in which it noted that City Council will […]
On a brisk but sunny spring morning, more than a dozen pre-kindergarteners file out of the imposing red brick building that is Clark Elementary and seat themselves, excitedly, on the sidewalk in front of the school’s garden. Sarah Harris greets them with a big smile. “Hello, my friends!” she calls. Harris is the early childhood […]
Last Thursday, county schools Superintendent Matt Haas read a letter of apology to the community from the Albemarle teen who made a racist threat against CHS students. Joao Pedro Souza Ribeiro (we know his name because Charlottesville police released it, even though he’s a minor) made his anonymous post on 4chan, an online message board, […]
There’s no shortage of alarming climate news, but I was especially chagrined to discover, in the course of our reporting for this week’s Green Issue, that households in Charlottesville—ostensibly progressive, outdoorsy Charlottesville— had carbon emissions that were more than a ton above the national average. Why? One reason may be that the area, overall, is […]
I’m not much of a basketball fan—okay, I’m not a basketball fan at all—but I love a comeback story, and the UVA men’s team’s journey from last year’s humiliating defeat to this year’s championship is as good as it gets. You’d have to be made of stone to be unmoved by the nail-biting excitement of […]
It’s a very Charlottesville story: Megan Read first saw Michael Fitts’ work hanging in the Mudhouse when she was 16, and just learning to paint. “Holy shit—that’s what I want to do!” she recalls thinking. Years later, her own work was displayed there, and Fitts saw her piece “Resistance/Resilience” as he got his morning coffee […]
Last Wednesday evening, as former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu was telling a sold-out book festival crowd that the backlash against removing Confederate monuments was “not about the statutes,” and that white supremacists were “having a field day” under President Trump, Charlottesville police were investigating a threat posted on 4chan, by someone using the Pepe […]
Sylvan and Sheria Kassondwa’s 860-square foot, three-bedroom apartment would be fine, they say, if they had one or two kids. As it happens, they have five. “In my country, time is not money like here, you can spend more time with your family,” says Sylvan, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “And […]
Last week, we wrote about Detroit-based letterpress artist Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. If you’ve been to the Mudhouse lately, or a dozen other spots around town, you’ve seen his work: the brightly colored posters with stylized “words of wisdom” chosen by community members (e.g., “If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three”). Kennedy, who […]