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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since December 2017. In this issue, Conger, in the first of what […]
Last week, Albemarle County Schools superintendent Matt Haas declared a ban on Confederate, Nazi, and other imagery associated with “white supremacy, racial hatred, or violence” from the school system’s dress code. A few days later, the city quietly celebrated Liberation and Freedom Day, which City Council established just two years ago, to commemorate the arrival […]
Countless studies have found that parents are less happy than non-parents (who, after all, are free to spend their weekends sleeping late, pursuing activities they enjoy, and having uninterrupted conversations). But American parents, it turns out, have got it particularly bad. A 2016 study found that the “happiness gap” between parents and non-parents here was […]
In 1986, a young lawyer and UVA grad named Rick Middleton left his job at a national environmental nonprofit in D.C. and moved to Charlottesville. With two other lawyers, a three-year grant, and a small office on the Downtown Mall, he established the first environmental advocacy organization focused on the South, determined to use the […]
A 75th wedding anniversary is so rare that the U.S. Census Bureau keeps no statistics on it, Mary Jane Gore tells us. Estimates are that fewer than 0.1 percent of marriages make it to 70 years or more. So this Valentine’s Day week, we tell you about Bill and Shirley Stanton of Afton, who celebrated […]
February is Black History Month, a time when schools across the country dutifully trot out lessons about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. In 2015, a minor firestorm ensued when Orange County High School students connected the civil rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter movement in a school performance, and an […]