It’s comforting to think that the law is the law, an impartial arbiter of right and wrong. But applying and enforcing our laws involves endless individual decisions. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania made the decision to prosecute DeAndre Harris, a teacher’s aide who worked with special education students at Venable Elementary and was brutally beaten […]
It’s comforting to think that the law is the law, an impartial arbiter of right and wrong. But applying and enforcing our laws involves endless individual decisions. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania made the decision to prosecute DeAndre Harris, a teacher’s aide who worked with special education students at Venable Elementary and was brutally beaten […]
What kind of message does failing to prosecute white supremacists send? By Anne Coughlin To mark the anniversary of the Unite the Right rally, commentators took stock of the successful prosecutions of white supremacists who committed violence and spread hatred in Charlottesville. Such prosecutions are a measure of law enforcement’s commitment to punishing violent offenders, […]
These days, when people talk about “innovation” or “entrepreneurship,” they’re often talking about tech. But the drive to experiment and create predates our digital age, of course, and it isn’t confined to code. On Friday, I had the pleasure of meeting Ivar Aass of Spirit Lab Distilling, who’s brewing single malt whiskey and other delicious […]
By Richard Dickerson I am a native of Charlottesville. I attended all-black Jefferson Elementary School, Johnson and McGuffey elementary schools, Buford Junior High, and Lane High School, class of 1973. Many things have changed since I left Charlottesville, shortly after graduation. The University of Virginia, however, remains omnipotent in terms of academics, economics, and public […]
Charlottesville is an expensive place to live, and with a new crop of students settling in at UVA, we figured it was a good time to pull together some of our favorite deals around town. See our completely idiosyncratic list, from coffee to donuts, and add your own go-tos online. Also this week, we take […]
Though the weather still says summer, August 21 is the first day of school, and the new academic year brings some changes. Less than a year ago, a New York Times/ProPublica story shone a national spotlight on some uncomfortable facts about Charlottesville City Schools: that black students are overrepresented when it comes to suspensions and […]
Leaving aside the snipers on the roof of the historical society, the second anniversary of August 11 and 12 saw, as promised, a much lighter police presence than last year. And in the absence of checkpoints and bag searches, there was room for community events focused not just on reflecting and remembering, but on using […]
By Seth Green On August 5, I went to my first City Council meeting. I was one of the few people left in the room when local activist Tanesha Hudson made her request for additional funding to bring the artist Wale, a well-known D.C. rapper, to perform in Tonsler Park as part of Unity Days. […]
“I’m tired,” community activist Rosia Parker says in our feature this week. So many of us are. We’re two and a half years in to a presidency defined by all-caps Twitter rants and dehumanizing attacks on vulnerable people. We’re a few days past two more mass shootings, almost back-to-back, one of which was explicitly motivated […]
Recently, we got the chance to talk with Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, and in this issue you can catch up on some of his delightfully eccentric visions . Those of us who were around in the late ’90s might remember the fanfare attendant in gathering your friends—and their CD players—in order to play all […]