Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, says the law needs to be updated, but that it will not be a simple process. “Really cruel, harassing stuff is protected by Section 230,” he said. “There are ways, with deep study and long interrogation, we can come up with changes to Section 230 that can protect the vulnerable and allow these companies to continue to try to filter responsibly.”
“If China doesn’t need U.S. movies, Hollywood studios will have to dramatically reduce their spending on big-budget blockbusters,” UVA media studies professor Aynne Kokas, the author of “Hollywood Made in China,” said. “The current budgets are unsustainable without access to the China market. That could fundamentally change the model of the U.S. film industry.”
HBO’s decision to back the film stands in contrast to another recent case of a political documentary from an acclaimed filmmaker, Bryan Fogel’s Jamal Khashoggi movie “The Dissident." Global streamers passed on the film, possibly because of fears of economic reprisal from the Saudi government. Aynne Kokas, a UVA professor and author of “Hollywood Made In China,” about their relationship, said a film’s popularity was a key variable in China’s reaction. But “if it does go viral I can see possible penalties for other HBO shows and significant impact for broader Warner Media distribution.”
Several apologies appeared in 2018. National Geographic hired John Edwin Mason, a historian at the University of Virginia, to review its archives for an issue dedicated to race. He found that, until at least the seventies, the magazine depicted people of color in exoticized ways, often nude and as “happy hunters, noble savages – every type of cliché,” Susan Goldberg, the editor in chief, wrote.
Sarah Milov, a UVA associate professor of history, says there are lessons for environmentalists to take from anti-smoking crusaders, whose history she chronicles in dazzling detail in the book, “The Cigarette: A Political History.” I spoke with Milov to discuss the comparisons between Big Oil and Big Tobacco, the innovations and flaws of nonsmokers’ protest methods, and the unique challenges facing climate activists.
“In the early days of The_Donald, there was an interesting mix of gleeful disbelief around the success of the subreddit,” said Lana Swartz, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.” Their stated goal, after all, was “to make a meme president.”
Coronaviruses mutate more slowly than other so-called RNA viruses — such as influenza, HIV and hepatitis C — because they have a "proofreading" function to correct errors as they replicate in cells. This function is necessary because SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses have a longer genome to copy, said William Petri, an infectious disease professor at the UVA School of Medicine.
COVID-19 has killed Americans of color out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, but that disparity can only be corrected in the context of the larger racial and economic inequalities in American society. That was the central message to emerge from the recent webinar, “Color and COVID-19: The Virus’s Disproportionate Impact,” hosted by the MJH Life Sciences COVID-19 Coalition. Participants included Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care and infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia and director of the medical ICU, and Dr. Ebony Hilton, associate professor of anes...
Given the supply bottlenecks and confusion that have plagued the vaccine rollout so far, UVA health business expert Vivian Riefberg urged people to be patient. She noted that the vaccine rollout is “one of the greatest mass mobilizations we’ve ever had.”
A new art installation is on display at the UVA Medical Center’s south tower after a Lexington woman created and donated it to honor health care workers. Barbara Crawford says she was moved by the dedication of the front-line staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the way UVA staff cared for her husband who had cancer for 10 years.
There will be another COVID-19 vaccination site for community members starting Sunday. The Blue Ridge Health District and UVA Health are partnering to launch a vaccination site in the Seminole Square Shopping Center on Hillsdale Drive.
“There has long been a question about whether maintaining a healthy lifestyle can delay or prevent the development of macular degeneration,” said researcher Bradley Gelfand of UVA’s Center for Advanced Vision Science. “The way that question has historically been answered has been by taking surveys of people, asking them what they are eating and how much exercise they are performing. The problem with that is that people are notoriously bad self-reporters, and that can lead to conclusions that may or not be true. This [study] offers hard evidence from the lab for very first time.”
An online survey wants to see if there is a need for a place where people can safely telework when they can’t necessarily do it from home. The Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission is working with UVA and the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission to conduct the survey.
(Editorial) According to UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, the state’s population has already fallen below national growth levels during the past decade “to reach the lowest population growth rate since the 1920s.”
In 1817, Thomas Jefferson traveled to an abandoned farm near his home to launch his final public project. Joining him that day were 10 enslaved laborers who became the first of thousands forced to shape the land, construct the buildings and serve the students at what would become the University of Virginia.
In-person classes will be back in session for undergrads at the University of Virginia on Monday. Ahead of the spring semester, UVA leadership held a town hall and answered some questions about the safety of students, faculty, and the community.
UVA will be welcoming students back to Grounds on Feb. 1. UVA President Jim Ryan says the University is ready to welcome students back and classes will be held both in-person and online.
The University of Virginia drew a record 48,000 applications for the next class in Charlottesville — about 15% more than the year before. Freshman applications to the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University also spiked. The sudden explosion in demand for these and other big-name schools is another ripple effect of the coronavirus pandemic that could reshape college admissions for many years to come.
When Sara Rodell, a 2008 University of Virginia graduate, heard about thousands of COVID-19 patients dying alone, she took matters into her own hands.
Lesley Lokko has been busy since stepping down from her position as dean of the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College of New York in 2020. The Architect’s Newspaper sat down with Lokko, currently a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and the Cooper Union, to discuss her new venture, the African Futures Institute, an architectural school she is founding in Accra, Ghana, and what she’s learned about race and identity during her decades-long career in architectural academia.