There’s a climactic moment in the film Friday Night Lights, a Hollywood adaptation of a book that tracks the fortunes of a small high school football team in its pursuit of a Texas state championship, when the coach delivers a halftime speech about what it means to “be perfect.” When I saw it for the […]
There’s a climactic moment in the film Friday Night Lights, a Hollywood adaptation of a book that tracks the fortunes of a small high school football team in its pursuit of a Texas state championship, when the coach delivers a halftime speech about what it means to “be perfect.” When I saw it for the […]
It’s easy to think you know someone’s story when you see him every day. Working on the Downtown Mall, I play that trick on myself all the time. I see people going to and from work, watch the expressions on their faces change through the week, mark how they sneak away from the job to […]
Whoo whee. My wife delivered a healthy baby boy on Saturday. Talk about an experience that goes beyond where words can follow. You spend all that time waiting and preparing and in the final days before the birth, a hush comes over your life and then everything is distilled down to this one room. Life […]
Our country was born proud with a guilty conscience. Its patriotism flowed not from the blood, the land, or a shared ancestry, but instead from a common commitment to a set of abstract principles: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even as the words were written down, though, our government and […]
My wife and I moved to Charlottesville from the mountains west of Asheville, North Carolina, the narrow Tuckasegee River valley tucked between the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountain ranges that was the ancestral home of the Cherokee and one of the last strongholds of Appalachian culture. Apart from overflowing with natural beauty, it’s a […]
“We are a nation of laws and the jury has spoken,” President Obama said in his statement responding to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Indeed. The president’s message to the American public was no doubt delivered to tamp down any larger race-based responses (the hypothetical riots that haven’t yet materialized) to […]
A week back or so, I had an interesting exchange with a woman who had grown up here. She was adamant that somebody who came from the county couldn’t say he was “a Charlottesville native,” citing, among other things, the Commonwealth’s practice of separating cities from their counties jurisdictionally and the distinct identity separations between […]
My first job out of college was waiting tables at a French bistro near Columbia University in Upper Manhattan. The place was like the U.N. The owner was an Israeli, the head chef a Parisian-Algerian, the dishwasher a Mexican from Guerrero. The bartender was from Dublin, and we had waiters from Delhi, Walbrzych, and Tel […]
Power. Hah. It’s a construct. A misconception. A vision of the world with puppet strings. True power is in God’s hands, or it is the electric-water life force that runs through all things, as evident in the beating of the butterfly’s wings as in the groaning Grand Coulee Dam. Power cannot be a human depth chart. […]
Free market housing Recently this paper published an article about the well-documented problem of Charlottesville’s housing unaffordability. It claimed that nearly half the city’s population now pays over 30 percent of income on housing, making it Virginia’s second-costliest city. To a degree this problem exists because many residents here are unemployed or hold low-wage jobs. […]