Late last year, Southwood residents agreed to name the first park in the redeveloped neighborhood Five Pillars Park, after UVA men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett’s program’s Five Pillars: humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness.
As UVA students prepare to return to campus next week on Feb. 1, lessons learned from the fall semester leave some local leaders at greater ease now than in August.
As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level,” I had the pleasure of interviewing [UVA Law alumnus] Russ Thomas, the chief executive officer of Availity. Under Thomas’s leadership, Availity is leading the charge in provider engagement, empowering health care professionals to improve results by delivering healthcare business solutions to a growing network that connects physicians, hospitals, and technology partners with health plans nationwide.
Andrew Ramspacher carries a tribute to Doug Doughty in his wallet, something he probably never would have acquired had he not befriended the legendary Roanoke Times sports writer. It’s a Choice Hotels rewards card. You know the illustrious brands: Comfort Inn, Econo Lodge, Rodeway Inn and the like. They’re affordable joints, the kinds of places that brag on their marquees if they have wireless internet. “This shows you how official it is,” Ramspacher said of the rewards card, which Doug insisted he get if they were going to travel together. “My name is not printed; it’s in magic marker.” Yes, ...
(Commentary; free registration required) As I watched Jon Wertheim’s Jan. 10 interview of Maine’s junior Sen. Angus King [a UVA alumnus] on the iconic CBS television program “60 Minutes,” I felt my pulse and respiration rate slow and a sense of serenity come over me. That’s how you’re supposed to feel after a yoga session, not after listening to a politician speak.
During a 10-hour operation, UVA neurosurgeon Ashok Asthagiri removed a grade 2 astrocytoma, a slow-growing malignancy that he said “could have been there for years.”
The United States is a little weird compared to other developed countries in terms of how we hand over control of the government – even before the challenging, to put it mildly, transition we had this year. “We do this odd thing of basically lopping off the top of the pyramid of our senior employees across the federal government and asking presidents to make roughly 4,000 political appointments,” said Katherine Dunn-Tenpas, a senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center. “And of the 4,000, roughly 1,300 or so require Senate confirmation,” she said.
Michigan's Republican primary is more than 18 months away, and political analysts said conservative outrage at Meijer might subside by then. An Iraq veteran and the grandson of retailer Fredrik Meijer, Peter Meijer has widespread name recognition in his district and has money to help fend off a challenge. "If there were an election next week, Peter Meijer might lose a primary, but that’s not what's happening here," said Kyle Kondik of UVA’s Center for Politics.
"We've depended on a combination of legal requirements and norms to prevent conflicts of interest and self-dealing," said Deborah Hellman, a UVA law professor who studies political corruption. "Once norms get broken, it's hard to put them back together again."
Using the 14th Amendment to remove a president would put Congress in murky waters, both legally and politically. UVA’s Philip Zelikow recently wrote in Lawfare that “Congress can apply the 14th Amendment disqualification to Trump, by majority vote.”
While masks mandates are in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, they’re doing a good job of preventing the spread of other common illnesses. Dr. Bill Petri with UVA Health says that Virginia is experiencing extremely low cases of Influenza this year. He says masks are a big reason for that drop-off.
For more than 200 years, Haiti’s independence story has inspired African-Americans, from Frederick Douglas to Langston Hughes and the Rev. Al Sharpton. “The Haitian Revolution is the original Black Lives Matter movement,” Marlene Daut, a UVA African diaspora studies professor, said. “This past summer when we saw Black Lives Matter protests, this was the display of the revolutionary movement coming alive,” Daut said.
The Tuskegee Study, in which doctors purposefully neglected to provide appropriate treatment to Black men in order to study the long-term effects of syphilis, lasted from 1932 to 1972 and gave Black Americans ample cause to distrust medical researchers. “To this day it is likely why a large portion of our unrepresented minorities are going to have a fear of wanting to enroll in trials,” says Siddhartha S. Angadi, a UVA cardiovascular-exercise physiologist.
“When we think about health and health care, I think many of us envision a clinic or a hospital. You think about interacting with a nurse or a doctor,” said Dr. Irène Mathieu, pediatrician and public health researcher at UVA Children’s. “What many people don’t realize is that the vast majority of what determines happens outside of those settings, long before we even interact with the health care system.”
As the world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be difficult to imagine how humans a thousand years ago would relate to a deadly virus neither seen nor imagined. Actually, it’s not hard. Their method is on TV, movie screens and a plethora of paperback books and pulp novels. It’s the vampire. “We really don’t know how old the vampire is, but the earliest mention comes from an old Russian text from about 1047 AD,” said Stanley Stepanic, a UVA associate professor of Slavic languages and literature and an authority on vampires. “That’s the first time ‘vampire’ appears in writing, but we ...
Kimberly Whitler, an assistant professor of marketing at UVA’s Darden School of Business, said she is not surprised that some brands are choosing not to run Super Bowl commercials this year. Whitler believes the events of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic and presidential election, have created an abnormal degree of uncertainty this year – not just in terms of finances, but also in terms of messaging.
From celebrities who invest in bitcoin, to a highly-engaged bitcoin community on Twitter, TikTok and Reddit, social media feeds into bitcoin’s popularity. “Suddenly, there’s like a new way to see, finance and to have an identity of yourself as an actor in like the financial space,” said Lana Swartz, UVA assistant professor of media studies and author of “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.”
In addition to the biannual Thinkers50 list of the world's top 50 thought leaders in the world of management, the Radar list, published annually in January, provides an eclectic selection of 30 people working on groundbreaking ideas that reflect the current world in which we live and guide solutions we will benefit from in 2021 and beyond. … Laura Morgan Roberts is a professor at the UVA’s Darden School of Business, whose work focuses on maximizing human potential in diverse organizations and communities. Her work also emphasizes the importance of providing more meaningful opportunities ...
(Commentary by Philip Zelikow, White Burkett Miller Professor of History) Time has come for Congress to contemplate how to hold Donald Trump accountable for his efforts to overthrow the election and incite an insurrection.
(Commentary by Elizabeth R. Varon, Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History) In his illuminating and accessible new book, James Oakes, an acclaimed historian of emancipation, offers us a “third Lincoln”: neither the mythic Great Emancipator nor a flawed reluctant emancipator, but instead a committed proponent of antislavery constitutionalism.