“Travel involves being willing to expose yourself to new situations and to be able to tolerate some uncertainty because you don’t know exactly how it’s going to go,” says Bethany Teachman, a psychology professor and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia. According to Teachman, travel-related anxiety usually fits into one of three categories. 
PBS
Shortly after she finished college and before she began writing the essays that would form the backbone of her collection “Trick Mirror,” Jia Tolentino bounced a writing idea off one of her professors from the University of Virginia. 
Sometimes a simple thank you can go a long way, as a military daughter, Taylor Curro knows this to be true. To show her appreciation, Taylor decided to join in on a challenge in 2020, started by Operation Gratitude. “Just essentially it was challenging people to do something – whatever it was – 2,020 times,” she said. Taylor chose to write 2,020 letters to troops overseas. 
W. Nathaniel Howell – Charlottesville resident, John Minor Maury Jr. Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Kuwait – whose defiance of Saddam Hussein’s order to close the embassy after Iraq’s 1990 invasion led to the first Gulf War, was laid to rest in Albemarle County on Dec. 23. Howell, 81, died Dec. 17. 
Becky Sauerbrunn has already won two World Cups and an Olympic gold medal. The UVA alumna will take a run at another gold medal this summer, and do it with the title of captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team. 
UVA alumna Lindsay Shoop’s competitive spirit culminated in an Olympic gold medal in rowing at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing and later garnered an induction into the National Rowing Hall of Fame. The 39-year-old Charlottesville native turned coach and public speaker added another accolade to her portfolio recently: book author. “Better Great Than Never” outlines Shoop’s struggles with depression and encourages athletes to pursue their dreams. 
Rebuffed by the U.S. Navy in his quest to become a pilot on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Parke F. Smith made a fairly bold move for a 21-year-old. He joined another team. The British Royal Air Force. Smith was the last American pilot accepted into an RAF program in which British pilots were trained in the United States while war raged on the other side of the Atlantic. As a student at the University of Virginia, Smith learned to fly through the school’s Civilian Pilot Training Program. 
(Commentary by Jason Oliver Evans, Ph.D. student in religious studies) The high-stakes U.S. Senate race in Georgia catapulted the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church back into the spotlight. For 135 years, the church played a vital role in the fight against racism and the civil rights movement. It was the spiritual home of the civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It is now the home of the state’s first Black senator – the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at the church.  
That’s when she contacted Dr Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the UVA School of Medicine. Tucker’s speciality is researching cases of children who claim to have memories of past lives. Tucker has been researching the phenomenon for 20 years and approaches each case from a “place of skepticism.”  
The study results do, however, reinforce the critical need for initiating screening at age 45, said Dr. Andrew Wolf of the UVA School of Medicine. “If folks are reluctant to have a colonoscopy, stool-based screening is easy, can be done at home without any preparation, and can, like colonoscopy, definitely reduce the risk of dying needlessly from colorectal cancer,” Wolf, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. 
Although some argue granting them loans under the program was appropriate, as churches are employers and service providers, UVA Law professor Micah Schwartzman says it’s not that simple. “What makes our PPP different [from] past funding programs is the direct financing of religious operations and religious institutions,” he said. “It changes the landscape of how the federal government [and] state governments relate to religious organizations.” 
(Video) Twitter leaves U.S. President Donald Trump in the dark and the fallout from this story is global. Will leaders learn to watch their words? Among those interviewed is Siva Vaidyanathan, professor of media studies. 
UVA Law professor Danielle Citron, a longtime Twitter adviser and free-speech expert, said the company should have suspended Trump “the minute” he tweeted about looting and shooting. “If they had properly applied their rules, he would have been gone.” 
Saikrishna Prakash is a UVA Law professor focusing on constitutional law, foreign relations law and presidential powers. What’s Trump’s key legacy? “The last gasps of his administration are the most consequential, as he exerts a control over his most devoted followers and he’s talking about running again. He forced people to consider what the presidency has become in a way that wasn’t true I think either during the Bush or Obama administrations.” 
Political practitioners and analysts said most institutions bent during Trump’s time in office, and some of them broke. Even before this month’s assault on Capitol Hill, the debate had been raging over what academics labeled shortcomings that Trump had exposed, and where blame should lie. “I give most of them in one way or another low grades,” said James W. Ceaser, a UVA political scientist. “I don’t know whether I’d flunk them, but low grades.” 
CNN
Barbara Perry, the director of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center, said that a definite lasting impact will be Trump’s reshaping of the federal judiciary and US Supreme Court, by appointing three justices and giving America’s highest bench a 6-3 conservative-liberal majority. And time will tell whether Trump’s most lasting legacy was “the diminution of American democracy,” she said. 
Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, said: “If history is honest, it will remember Donald Trump as by far the worst president ever. No one else even comes close. Not Warren Harding, not James Buchanan, not Richard Nixon. Nobody comes close. “And beyond that he is, in my view, the most horrible human being who has ever sat in the Oval Office. In addition to being the worst president, he’s a terrible person. What a combination. I hope we’ve learned this lesson. This ought to remind all Americans what happens when you make a mistake with your vote.” 
Vox
Airbnb is balancing some lost customers and revenue with preserving the trust and safety of the rest of the guests and hosts on its platform – issues it’s dealt with over and over and has since taken a stronger stance on. “These issues post a big risk in terms of safety of guests and safety of property and of hosts,” said Rajkumar Venkatesan, a UVA business professor. “It’s mission critical for their long-term survival and growth.” 
Repealing the law could have the opposite effect, experts say, because it could open the companies up to more lawsuits and therefore they could be incentivized to take down more material to avoid legal battles and fees. If the companies really were disinclined to take any action, the Internet could quickly become overrun with objectionable posts, said Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “No one would use that Internet,” she said. “It would be overrun by Nazis and spam.” 
In July, a coalition of conservative scholars led by Brad Wilcox of the UVA-based Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, sent a letter to Congress endorsing an expansion of the Child Tax Credit which, the authors argued, “reduces poverty while fostering some of our nation’s most critical investments: those that parents make for their children.” When I asked Wilcox if his endorsement extends to Biden’s plan, he indicated general support (though he could not commit without specifics).