Well that was fun, wasn’t it? I mean that nice, two-year bit of semi-hope and change. But now it seems we’re back to the grind. You don’t have to be prescient to see Congressional gridlock just up the road. Our favorite almost-vice president is laying the ground work for a 2012 run at the White […]
After the hearing in Richmond, after activists and academics and law enforcement members testified to change Virginia’s marijuana laws, and after a General Assembly subcommittee struck down two bills that would do just that, what was left in the hearing room was this: a small baggie of a “leafy substance,” stashed behind the podium. It […]
Each November, the New Oxford American Dictionary celebrates one new word that’s garnered serious cultural currency in the past year. In 2008, it was “hypermiling,” or to maximize gas mileage through extreme driving practices. This year, “unfriend”—deleting a friend on a social networking site—got the neologistic nod. Every year new words are welcomed with pomp […]
Before we get into the chemical compounds and statistical trends and tonnage numbers sure to scare the hair right off a hippie, let’s you and I define a word. Ambitious. The definition of this adjective, I think we both can agree, rests in the details of one particular plan of President Barack Obama. WHAT’S YOUR […]
If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last six months in the glow of computer screens that shine slumping graphs onto your bewildered face, mumbling the day’s TED spread in your sleep and generally trying not to freak out as we ride out our sputtering economy as Amelia Earhart surely rode out her Lockheed Electra. […]
I have a personal and rather embarrassing standard for Metallica. It hinges on one question: Does the song lend itself to the daydream in which I stand on a stage, 32nd-note riffs sparking from my guitar, and snarl vocals that proceed to both impress and frighten the crowd, which—incidentally—is composed in equal parts of people […]
I am inclined to disbelieve in life’s exactness, but I swear this to be true. Precisely in the middle of the 10-hour drive that connects my old home of Washington, D.C., to my hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, a drive I have made many times in many emotional states and will continue to make for the […]
Gentle Reader, It’s time we had a talk. Things haven’t been the best between us for some time, I think we’ll both admit. While some of you are holding this page in your hand, trying to keep our relationship alive, the Old Media Writer and the 21st Century Reader, I know some of you are […]
At the end of May, incoming UVA law school students got word that the student-loan ground was shifting beneath their very feet. An e-mail from Cynthia Burns, the director of financial aid for the law school, informed incoming first-years that the University had ended its relationship with Bank of America.
Todd Lucas is a difficult man to doubt. He is earnest and he is forceful and he is a person possessed of an electric personality channeled through a gleaming sledgehammer of a smile. So if Detective Todd Lucas of the Charlottesville Police Department says that there are gangs operating in a fair city such as […]