Pick: Joe Troop
For the record: Having grown up as an openly gay man in the South, musician and activist Joe Troop is familiar with controversy. The bluegrass player has been threatened and […]
Pick: The Moth
Gather ‘round: A cowboy, a UVA professor, and an astronaut walk into a bar…or something like that. You never know who you’ll meet at The Moth, a live storytelling showcase […]
Pick: Railroad Earth
Return to rock: Americana quintet Railroad Earth has been performing bluegrass with rock ‘n’ roll spirit for over 20 years. The band’s upcoming album, All For The Song, marks both […]
Robotic delivery
If Terry Gilliam remade “The Jetsons,” it might go something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Bigbug. This French science-fiction comedy takes a generally dark movie sub-genre—robot servants revolting against their human masters—and […]
Figuring it out
By Matt Dhillon In February, Saul Kaplan marked both his 93rd birthday and the release of a new book of artwork. The self-published Sketches: Faces of Life & Love highlights […]
From the top
How do you get people to appreciate, value, and protect creatures and ecosystems they have never seen? Two authors approach this challenge from different but complementary perspectives at a panel […]
Beautiful ugly places
Southern landscapes can evoke images of magnolias, Spanish moss, or Billie Holiday’s strange fruit. Those perceptions of the South as a beautiful but benighted part of the country bring three […]
Modern magic
For a genre that’s supposed to blow past the boundaries of what’s imaginable, fantasy can be predictable. The genre historically suffers from a lack of diversity on all fronts, and […]
Righting wrongs
In 1968, two doctors at the Medical College of Virginia performed one of the first heart transplants in the United States—unbeknowst to the man whose heart was transplanted. In The […]
Unfair advantage
After reading a book in graduate school that discussed how enslaved women sold goods in South Carolina and Barbados, Justene Hill Edwards became fascinated by the economy of the enslaved. […]