The University of Virginia is often described as Jeffersonian, as academically elite, as a public Ivy. Less often used: cool. The Virginia Pep Band, during its nearly three-decade heyday, was cool. Pep Banned, a documentary that premieres at the Virginia Film Festival, captures the joyful subversion of the student-run band that took to the football […]
Nearly eight years ago, Charlottesvillians learned they had the highest health insurance premiums in the country. The Department of Justice filed a notice in December that it was intervening in a longstanding whistleblower case against Sentara Health, which the government alleged had cost taxpayers $665 million. By June, the DOJ said, never mind. What happened […]
The University of Virginia has many storied traditions. One, that of the Virginia gentleman, contributed to UVA being the last public university—aside from military institutions—to allow women. Spurred by a lawsuit, the school admitted its first class of female students in 1970. Gail Burrell Gerry was a member of that class of 367 women, and […]
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—or, in this case, the trees. Henry Alexander Wiencek has followed in the footsteps of his parents, Charlottesville writers and historians Donna Lucey and Henry Wiencek, with his own book, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930, published by the University of Texas Press in May. […]
One of the biggest stories that shocked America 100 years ago—about a farm in Georgia where Black people were essentially enslaved and at least 11 men were murdered—is pretty much forgotten today. That will change with Earl Swift’s eighth book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second […]
For nearly three years, the Department of Justice has investigated whether Sentara made false claims for $665 million in Affordable Care Act subsidies when it jacked its rates 266 percent in Charlottesville in 2017, making them the highest in the country. In November, the DOJ took the unusual step of petitioning a federal judge to […]
Remember back in 2017, when some here learned their health insurance premiums could jump to $3,000 a month and that Charlottesville’s rates were the highest in the country? Those eye-popping premiums have drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which is taking a look at how the rates for Optima Health Plan, owned […]
The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that has roiled Charlottesville since 2016—and led to 2017’s deadly influx of white supremacists—has ceased to exist, at least as a Lost Cause icon. When parts of the bronze monument hit the crucible in a 2,200-degree furnace recently, it was a solemn and emotional experience for the […]
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America. “It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he […]
More than seven years after eight African Americans filed a lawsuit accusing an Albemarle police officer of racial profiling, the county has settled the complaint. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper,” says plaintiffs’ attorney Jeff Fogel, who had prepared to go to trial several times over the course of the case. “It […]