(Book review by Gerard Alexander, professor of politics) Olaf Gersemann, a German journalist, 15 years ago set out to correct Europeans who believed that economic life in America was a race to the bottom. He showed that America’s flexible labor markets, dynamic growth, and job creation worked at least as well as Europe’s economies and welfare states. Now American writer David Harsanyi bookends that earlier project with a new text that punctures not European myths about America, but the myths that some Americans hold about Europe.
(Book review by Elizabeth R. Varon, Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history) In this bold, perceptive offering, the Harvard law professor Noah Feldman contends that as president, Abraham Lincoln unilaterally tore apart and remade the Constitution, ensuring the demise of slavery but also “effectively transforming himself into a constitutional dictator.” While Feldman’s book, “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America,” has many valuable insights, its argument downplays some crucial context.
(Commentary by Christopher Ali, associate professor of media studies) President Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill promises the largest public investment in telecommunications in the country’s history. Of the $65 billion allocated for high-speed internet—broadband—$42.45 billion is earmarked specifically for deployment projects through state grants. Now that the legislation has passed the House, and Biden will sign it into law Monday, all hopes for broadband connectivity now turn to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which has 180 days to write the rul...
(Podcast) Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating institutions that incorporate other elites into the inner circles of power, dictators create regimes that can outlast their founders. By creating clear lines of succession, they avoid disruptive power struggles that could bring down the regime. Anne Meng is a professor of political science at the University of Virginia who studies authoritarian institutions.
Researchers at the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute are seeing cases continue to decline or plateau across the state. But COVID-19 case rates remain high in some regions, particularly Southwest Virginia. “So far, Virginia has not seen a repeat of increased transmission rates seen last fall. This reduces the expected impact of a potential holiday surge,” the UVA researchers said. “Nevertheless, the model shows a large surge is possible under current vaccination rates.”
In what could be very good news for the immunocompromised, an antibody cocktail tested at the University of Virginia School of Medicine appears to offer long-lasting protection from COVID-19.
Acocktail of COVID-19 antibodies tested at the University of Virginia appears to not only help patients already suffering from the disease but offers long-lasting protection against the virus for those who have been exposed.
Attending preschool also reduces the percentage of children repeating a grade by 15%, according to a study done by researchers at the University of Virginia that appeared in the Education Finance and Policy journal’s spring 2019’s issue.
Who counts as a scientist? In an effort to answer that daunting question, Caitlin Wylie (a UVA associate professor of science, technology, and society) focuses on one group of professionals that often goes unrecognized: fossil preparators. The result is her newly released book “Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes,” which takes her to 14 museums across the country.
(Book review) Andrew D. Kaufman’s biography “The Gambler Wife” is not only a much-needed act of justice; it is also profoundly entertaining, sometimes funny, and sometimes intolerably sad.
Mount Zion First African Baptist Church held a supply drive on Saturday, November 13, but they also had some help from the community. Volunteers at the site say other churches participated in the same event, in order to give back. They were also joined by the University of Virginia Police Department, who donated some of the items.
Brown’s public reckoning inspired a national dialogue about how institutions have benefitted from slavery, and approximately 100 schools embarked on their own similar projects. Brown’s work also inspired the creation of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium at the University of Virginia, an international group of over 75 schools devoted to addressing slavery and racism in institutional histories.
A senior American faith leader said Friday during a landmark address at the University of Virginia that the nation’s believers should respect legal efforts to protect people from discrimination as much as they desire to protect religious liberty. The best way to resolve “the current conflict between two great values” is to seek public policy solutions that protect both, said President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is urging that a better approach be used in dealing with current conflicts, without compromising an individual’s core values. President Oaks made the point as part of his speech at the University of Virginia’s 2021 Joseph Smith Lecture on religious liberty on Friday night.
Though he dedicated most of his professional career to the courts, Latter-day Saint apostle Dallin H. Oaks argued Friday that when disputes arise between religious freedom and nondiscrimination, the best remedies are found not through litigation, but through legislation. “Courts are ... ill-suited to the overarching, complex and comprehensive policymaking that is required in a circumstance like the current conflict between two great values,” Oaks, a former attorney, law professor and Utah Supreme Court justice, said in a speech at the University of Virginia.
The pandemic forced many colleges to address their students’ lack of access to the internet, but experts say most schools still don’t have good data on their students’ home connections. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know the extent of it. “There is this presumption of connectivity when you get to college, like, ‘Oh, you’ll just have it.’ Well, that’s not the case,” says Christopher Ali, who studies internet access at UVA.
“Yes, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a big deal,” said Peter Norton, a history professor in UVA’s Engineering School. “But the bill is not transformational, because most of it is more of the same.”
COVID-19 cases are rising in a number of U.S. states ahead of the holiday season, and it’s prompting warnings of a coming winter wave, as health care officials point to rising cases in Europe as a sign of what’s to come in the United States. “Sadly, I do think that we’re at the beginning of a wave,” said Dr. Taison Bell, assistant professor of medicine in UVA Health’s divisions of Infectious Diseases and International Health and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. “Unfortunately what we’re seeing are cases rising in Europe, driven by areas that are unvaccinated. We tend to run behind them by...
The Shenandoah County man who grew a rural telephone company into a regional telecommunications enterprise is being remembered this week not only as a visionary businessman but also as an active community member, a passionate farmer, and a devoted family man. Warren Ballinger French Jr., of Edinburg [a UVA Engineering alumnus], died Nov. 4 of natural causes. He was 98.