(Commentary by Ken White, associate dean at the School of Nursing, and Tim Short, a palliative care physician at UVA Health) COVID-19 has changed our work, making it less of a specialty and more of a desperately required competency. We have seen our fellow clinicians unsteadied by the end-of-life care they feel underprepared or unprepared to give during this pandemic. But these days, we all are palliative care providers, ready or not.
Walkability is so important that the future of Tysons may depend on whether people can safely and easily get around on foot. But how do you know if an area is walkable? Andrew Mondschein, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental planning in UVA’s School of Architecture, may have some answers. He has been teaching there for six years, and has been studying walkability in Tysons for about as long.
While Washington Nationals reliever (and UVA alumnus) Sean Doolittle might not be a household name outside of the nation’s capital, the MLB pitcher has a pretty solid résumé. He’s spent eight seasons in the big leagues, appeared in two All-Star games, and won a World Series title. He’s also made a bit of a name for himself on social media.
(Commentary by Guian McKee, associate professor of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs) In just a few months, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted deeply troubling failures of American democracy. Among the most revealing is the pandemic’s demonstration that debates about the future of the U.S. health care system have been tragically narrow in their focus on health insurance coverage alone.
“What Disney has to do is figure out how to make itself matter, how to get in front of audiences in very different ways than it has in the past,” said Carmen Higginbotham, a UVA professor who is one of the country’s leading experts on Disney and popular culture.
(Commentary by Melody Barnes, co-director of UVA’s Democracy Initiative) I live on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, but Monument Avenue wasn’t meant for me. My own experience carries the imprint both of white supremacy and the efforts to overcome it.
Jenny McHugh loved art as a kid, taking classes for about 10 years. But as she grew older, her creative tendencies took a backseat to other interests, including competitive gymnastics. Thanks in part to the urging of her mom, the UVA geraduate began tapping into her artistic side again as an adult. In April, McHugh launched Campbell + Charlotte, a fine-jewelry business with the tagline, “Serious jewels for those who don’t take themselves too seriously.” Designs range from playful to bold to updated classics.
The Virginia 30 Day Fund, a Charlottesville-based nonprofit, announced Wednesday it has disbursed 500 “lifelines” – or $3,000 forgivable loans – to small businesses in Virginia that have financially struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike federal PPP loans, which can take up to a month to make decisions, Snyder promises applicants to the Virginia 30 Day Fund an answer on funding within three business days. The application review process is powered by a mix of 50 alums from UVA’s Darden School of Business and William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business.
The Virginia Film Festival has added six new members from the film industry and the community to its VAFF Advisory Board, including three with University of Virginia ties.
Sagar Sapkota, who is headed to UVA to study mechanical engineering, said he was proud to have been given the opportunity. “I’m really happy that I’m going to college, because my parents have sacrificed a lot for me and my brothers,” he said. Sapkota is one of 31 graduating seniors from the AHC Inc. College and Career Readiness program who are headed off to colleges across the region and across the nation. All are residents of one of AHC’s local apartment communities. Combined, the students were accepted into 135 institutions of higher learning, and received scholarship offers valued at about ...
(Commentary) So, now that Amy McGrath has won the Democratic nomination to challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch “Root-‘n-Branch” McConnell in the fall, what is she going to do with it? Not much, if you listen to the analysts who are paid to handicap this sort of thing. Both Sabato’s Crystal Ball, ramrodded by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and the Cook Political Report, see the ultimate outcome as likely Republican.
(Commentary) All signs point to a system beyond reform. “You see lots of people putting forth a hopeful idea of a new, humane social media platform to rescue us – one that respects privacy or is less algorithmically coercive,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, said recently. “But if we’re being honest, what they’re really proposing at that point is not really social media anymore.”
Stephen Eubank, a professor at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative, said he had read a copy of the paper and found the conclusions well supported. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if the fatality rate from COVID-19, though higher than that for other infectious diseases, turns out to be not as high as some feared. “Especially in the early days of our experience of a novel disease, the case fatality rate is always biased upward because you don’t know what the denominator is,” he said, referring to the number of people infected.
(Commentary co-written by Douglas Laycock, Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law) Tuesday’s ruling in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue came as no surprise. The Montana Supreme Court had invalidated a state tax credit for donations to organizations supporting students in private schools, solely on the ground that some schools benefiting from the program would be religious. The state court relied for its authority on a state constitutional provision that singled out religious schools for exclusion from generally available funding, however indirect. The U.S. Supreme Court held t...
(Commentary by Russell Riley, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs) One of the main jobs for any president confronting major crisis is distinguishing merely unimaginable options from the genuinely impossible. Indeed, history indicates that a president relying on gifted help and applying courageous leadership can take a problem that others deem unsolvable and – against overwhelming odds – make it go away.
(Commentary) Which brings us back to the big question for K-12 education: If schools improve, boosting the academic achievement of black students, does that increase their earnings as adults? A 2016 paper from UVA scholars Dajun Lin, Randall Lutter, and Christopher J. Ruhm indicates that the answer is yes. It finds that wages are related to academic skills, as measured at the end of high school – and not just for early career workers, but over the course of a lifetime. Even more importantly, it also finds that African Americans (and Hispanics) see a greater return to cognitive skills than Whit...
“During the Jim Crow era, local white officials routinely manipulated property tax assessments to overburden and punish black populations and as a hidden tax break to landowning white gentry,” said UVA historian Andrew Kahrl.
We know exercise improves everything from cardiovascular disease to one’s cognitive health. Observational studies have also seen physical activity lessen age-related vision loss, but until now it hasn’t been clear how causal that relationship has been. New UVA research is offering the first experimental evidence to show how exercise can directly slow, or even prevent, macular degeneration.
The Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band won’t do its annual round of grants this fall, but it will still be helping nonprofits. The fund is partnering with the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation for the special Community Recovery and Catalyst Grant program, and it is making a $1 million commitment to the program. Bama Works and CACF will leverage the partnership and gifts from UVA Health, Twice is Nice Fund, and the Enriching Communities grant program, to increase funds that are available to make grants.
A Richmond man convicted of a 1996 murder that happened when he was 16 years old, and which he has always maintained he did not commit, was granted a conditional pardon Wednesday by Gov. Ralph Northam. Rojai Fentress, 40, was sentenced to 53 years for the drug-related murder that happened after parole was abolished in Virginia. He was not set to be freed until 2043. His lawyers with the UVA School of Law’s Innocence Project sought a pardon in 2018.