(Podcast) Facebook is hauled over the coals by Congress on a semi-regular basis, but this week has been especially damaging. Former employee Frances Haugen has blown the whistle on the company, leaking internal documents that reveal that it knew it was harming its users. Today on The Signal, what exactly has Facebook been keeping from the world? And what does the company have to say for itself? Featured: Siva Vaidyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
(Co-written by Kathryn Laughon, associate professor of nursing) We voted for Joe Biden with the expectation that the Biden administration would keep its promise to build a “fair and humane” immigration system, ending repressive immigration policies that keep children in cages, expel asylum applicants and restrict citizenship. … Instead, we woke up last week to see Border Patrol agents on horses chasing Black people with what looked like whips. We saw the Biden administration continuing anti-Black, anti-immigrant Trump administration policies. We saw them continuing to block asylum-seekers from...
Culpeper’s hospital just got a new and shorter name. Effective Oct. 1, the in-patient facility and ER on Sunset Lane will be known as UVA Culpeper Medical Center. UVA Haymarket and UVA Prince William, formerly part of Novant Health, have also been similarly renamed to align with UVA Health, its sole owner since July 1.
Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe made a stop in Charlottesville Wednesday to meet and talk with doctors about the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those doctors work at the University of Virginia, treating COVID-19 and pediatric patients. “It was eye-awakening in there to listen to these infectious doctors talk about how serious this is. That’s why from day one I’ve said everyone needs to be vaccinated,” McAuliffe said.
UVA Health is dedicating more than $30 million in fiscal year 2022 for increased compensation as a way to reward and retain staff. This will include market pay adjustments for a large portion of the organization’s workforce.
Low-cost antihypertensive drugs appeared associated with reductions in colorectal cancer-specific mortality among patients with stage I to stage III disease, according to results of a retrospective analysis published in Cancer Medicine. “Existing treatments for colorectal cancer cost upwards of several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but these agents have been shown to prolong survival only by three months to six months,” Rajesh Balkrishnan, a member of the cancer population health sciences program at University of Virginia Cancer Center, said. “Antihypertensive agents have been aro...
An international study has found that antibiotics alone cannot overcome the various factors that may cause stunted growth in children. According to a UVA release, researchers had hoped that some combination of antibiotics, vitamin B3 and a diarrhea treatment drug would lead to better growth for children in Tanzania. A double-blind study followed almost 1,200 children and found no benefit.
Previous research out of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University showed a representative’s law-passing skills have no significant impact on vote share in general elections, mostly because voters have no clue whether their representative is any good at passing laws or not.
A new study found more than half of Trump voters in 2020 supported red states seceding from blue states. This research comes out of the UVA Center for Politics. Larry Sabato and J. Miles Coleman of the Center for Politics say politics are now personal and impact life both in-person and online for many people, causing deep division.
(Commentary) Divorce usually isn’t a good idea, and that’s especially true of a nearly 250-year-old continental nation. The notion of a national breakup has long simmered as a fringe argument, but it is increasingly popular in certain precincts of the political right and has gained at least some traction with partisans of both sides. A recent survey by the UVA Center for Politics found that about 50% of Donald Trump voters and 40% of Joe Biden voters agreed to some extent with the proposition that the country should split up, with either red or blue states seceding.
That ubiquity has essentially turned WhatsApp into a public utility: It’s so crucial to global communications infrastructure that when it goes down, entire countries, segments of their economies, and even some basic daily governmental activities nearly grind to a halt. “It was basically like the entire internet was out. That was the perception” in Brazil, said David Nemer, a UVA media studies professor. A native Brazilian, Nemer has studied WhatsApp’s impact on the country.
Kim Forde-Mazrui, a professor at the UVA School of Law, said police held “a fairly privileged perspective” to think of a situation involving the repeated used of the n-word and monkey noises as “a sticks-and-stones matter. … The city and police department are being cowardly for not intervening and, if necessary, bringing charges so that a court can decide whether this is constitutionally protected,” Forde-Mazrui said.
84% of Trump voters worry about discrimination against whites and think Christianity is under attack
New polling released today by Project Home Fire in partnership with UVA’s Center for Politics has found that Trump voters are animated by concerns about anti-white discrimination and the fate of Christianity in America.
Naomi Alligator, the project of Los Angeles-based songwriter and multi-media artist [and UVA alumna] Corrinne James, shares a video for “Anywhere Else,” the new single from her upcoming EP and Carpark Records debut, “Concession Stand Girl.” Inspired by the sparse and confessional qualities of Liz Phair’s early portastudio recordings, James uses the project as her own musical journal to share and process personal anecdotes. Her modern folk production and poetic songwriting links the sounds of artists like Joan Baez and Steeleye Span to a 21st-century context.
Also confirmed Tuesday to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, which covers the rest of the state, was Chris Kavanaugh an assistant U.S. attorney, said the offices of U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine. Kavanaugh is the senior counsel to the deputy attorney general. He has practiced before every judge in the Western District and has worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office since 2014, handling a wide variety of federal criminal offenses involving domestic terrorism, civil rights violations, national security, white-collar offenses and violent crimes. Kavanaugh received...
The Lebanese writer [the Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at UVA this year] wants to change the world, one novel at a time.
“The past decade and a half has been one of the best stretches of my life,” Koehn said. “I do mean that … I know that Charlottesville and UVa is forever going to be a part of who I am. You know the saying, once a Wahoo, always a Wahoo.”
The Milwaukee Bucks have hired Dave Koehn as their new radio play-by-play voice. He replaces Ted Davis who retired after last season. Davis had been with the team for 24 years. Koehn comes from the University of Virginia where he has done radio and been director of broadcasting since 2008.
(Commentary) Virginia election expert Larry Sabato said that Biden’s woes are impacting the McAuliffe-Youngkin race big-time. “It’s obvious from history that a president’s popularity — or lack of it — is a factor in off-year elections. Biden’s drop in the polls couldn’t have been more poorly timed from McAuliffe’s perspective. Add to that the Democrats’ Keystone Kops performance in Congress,” he said. “If Democrats get their act together before November 2nd, a reasonable assumption is that Biden’s ratings would tick up and help McAuliffe, if only because it would increase Democratic voters’ li...
There is also evidence that coupling up improves the economic fortunes of couples, both men and women. It’s not that they only have to pay one rent or buy one fridge, say some sociologists who study marriage, it’s that having a partner suggests having a future. “There’s a way in which marriage makes men more responsible, and that makes them better workers,” says University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, pointing to a Harvard study that suggests single men are more likely than married men to leave a job before finding another.