Larry Sabato of the UVA Center for Politics will talk to an administrator at NASA on Tuesday. During a virtual forum, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a UVA School of Law alumnus, will discuss the latest developments at the civilian space agency.
(Subscription may be required) “The vast majority of Haitians don’t like foreign military intrusions, especially given the failed intervention of the U.N.,” said Robert Fatton Jr., a professor in the UVA Department of Politics who was born and raised in Haiti and has written several books about the country. “When they left there was nothing.” On the other hand, Mr. Fatton said, “the police in Haiti are completely dysfunctional now – the gangs have taken over Port-au-Prince, and they are probably better equipped than the police.”
(Commentary; subscription may be required) The ACC has staged 69 football seasons. The only one in which two of the league’s team ascended to No. 1 was 1990. The University of Virginia has played 1,345 football games. None was larger than Nov. 3, 1990 against Georgia Tech. To commemorate that extraordinary convergence, the ACC Network on Monday introduced a documentary: “We’re #1: The Story of 1990 ACC Football.”
A local couple translated their heartbreak into hope on Monday. They donated 1,000 specialized onesies to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at UVA Children’s in honor of their late son.
(Subscription may be required) Christopher J. Ruhm, a UVA professor of public policy and economics, found that under California’s paid leave law, new mothers who had worked during their pregnancy were estimated to be 17% more likely to have returned to work within a year of their child’s birth. During the second year of their child’s life, mothers’ time spent at work increased. “The evidence is pretty strong that we’d see favorable effects,” Mr. Ruhm said.
Today we’ll be delving into a different aspect of the German invasion of Luxembourg: namely, through the eyes of an American diplomat who did his absolute best to protect the Grand Duchy from the Nazis. George Platt Waller was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1889. An upper-class Southerner, he studied at the University of Virginia, before deciding to become a diplomat.
(By Daniel W. Sunshine, Ph.D. candidate in history) For three decades before the Civil War, Eastern Virginia’s leaders resisted calls for democratic reform from the Western portion of the state (modern day West Virginia). Antebellum Virginia was one of the least democratic states in the Union. Of course, no state was a true democracy in the early 19th century, as all women and men of color were denied citizenship. But even under this more limited conception, Virginia’s government proved demonstrably more oligarchic than other states.
There has been some backlash to Good’s move to discourage masks, with Larry Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Politics, calling the remark “outrageous.” “Outrageous: GOP Congressman Bob Good urges high school students to rebel against required mask wearing, and wants cameras in every classroom to record for parents everything teachers say. Blasts all colleges except Christian ones,” he tweeted.
In effect, Ciattarelli and other GOP office seekers don’t get past Go in the GOP electorate without trumpeting some level of hostility toward mandates. “They have become part of the mandatory signoff for Republican candidates,’’ said Larry Sabato, a UVA political scientist. “They have to be for all the usual things that Republicans identify with, but they’ve added opposition to mandates. And that can sell in a red state. It sure doesn’t sell in a blue state.”
(Commentary; subscription may be required) Larry Sabato, head of UVA’s Center for Politics, says what Democrats do in Washington during the final weeks of the race could swing momentum. It could swing to McAuliffe if President Joe Biden advances his legislation and popularity, or it could have the opposite effect if stalemate continues. “Do the Democrats in D.C. get their act together at last and pass the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better bill at whatever funding level?” Sabato wonders.
After a campaign event with the first lady on Friday, McAuliffe will welcome Stacey Abrams, a Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018 who has gained national prominence, and former President Barack Obama. Biden, too, is expected to hit the campaign trail as the end of the race nears. Abrams, who is heading to Norfolk on Sunday to lead a “Souls to the Polls” event, “will bring out the hardcore Democrats,” said David Ramadan, an adjunct professor at the Schar School at George Mason University and a resident scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
(Commentary) The key to Haugen’s revelations, according to UVA media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, is that “top Facebook leaders knew that, internally, all their data and studies supported what critics like me have been saying for more than a decade: The problems that Facebook amplifies are not easy — or even possible — to fix as long as the company continues to run on its founding principles, that maximizing users, growth and engagement are paramount and supersede all other values.”
Virginia authors Chip Jones, Brian Castleberry and Annie Kim were the big winners in the 24th annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards announced Saturday night. Hosted by Adriana Trigiani, the awards were held virtually this year, for the second year in a row, due to the pandemic. Kim won the poetry award for her collection “Eros, Unbroken.” She was born in Seoul and lives in Charlottesville, where she works as an assistant dean at the University of Virginia School of Law.
According to Siddhartha Angadi, an assistant professor of education in UVA’s Department of Kinesiology, plenty of research demonstrates how exercise transforms fat. “Exercise makes your fat fit, if that makes sense. And it’s kind of cool,” he says. “Data and investigations that show that when you exercise, you beige the white fat, so it starts to look more like brown. It’s not white-brown, but it’s not white-white. And so, it fits somewhere in the middle. But that’s what gives it its beneficial metabolic properties.”
Hispanic communities, like the Salvadorans in the D.C. area, have been establishing roots in Virginia for decades. In fact, the highest concentration of the state’s Hispanic population resides in Northern Virginia. But growth has happened all over the state. “The interesting thing is that most locations have seen a growth in the Hispanic population, even though the percentages may not be very high,” said Qian Cai, director at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
There are common-sense and research-backed reasons to be mindful of overpraising, of course. No student is always deserving of praise, and even students in elementary school can tell when praise is too lavish. When you use praise “for your own ends or even in a conscious attempt to help the student, it is likely to go wrong,” cautions Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.
(Commentary) The burnout shows in the shrinking corps of nurses as many exit the profession or find other specialties within medicine, as Ashley did. “We have a lot of nurses that are leaving the bedside to go to other areas because of the stress of seeing patients die of COVID day after day after day,” said Mesha, a nurse at the UVA Medical Center. “And with this current surge of (the) delta (variant), the patients are younger, and they’re getting sicker faster, and it takes a toll on you,” she said.
A record 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August -- the most since the Department of Labor started tracking this data in 2000. “You have a bunch of sectors that just pay minimum wage and labor is just going to veer over to where it finds the most profit,” said Vidya Mani, an associate professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business.
(Video) An FDA advisory panel has endorsed Johnson and Johnson’s booster shot for some 15 million Americans. Mireya Villarreal has the details on the panel’s decision. Dr. Taison Bell, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia, joins CBSN’s Lana Zak with his analysis.
Several said they thought the J&J vaccine should have been considered a two-dose vaccine from the start. “This does look like a second dose vaccine,” said Dr. Michael Nelson of the University of Virginia school of medicine.