(Commentary) Entertainer John Legend, who has 13.8 million Twitter followers, tweeted: “Black parents need to flood these tip lines with complaints about our history being silenced. We are parents too.” UVA political analyst Larry J. Sabato took that ask further. He tweeted: “Parents of ALL races should flood Youngkin’s tip line.”
It’s not entirely clear just what those “inherently divisive concepts” targeted by the Youngkin administration might include. Likewise, it’s not clear what the order means by “critical race theory,” which was originally recognized as a legal philosophy but now is often used to describe a larger grouping of racial equity policies or curricula that are frequent targets of conservative anger. “The order certainly doesn’t define what critical race theory is beyond saying that it is a set of ideas that foregrounds racial discrimination as a significant issue in American history and culture,” says R...
(Commentary) Some GOP legislators believe drop boxes, receptacles for early votes, are problems. Ken Hughes, researcher at UVA’s nonpartisan Miller Center, disagreed. “I voted by absentee ballot and drop box in the last election for health reasons, as did thousands of other voters,” Hughes said by email, “and we voted without jeopardizing the security of the election in any way. Politicians grossly exaggerate the problem of voting fraud to give themselves an excuse to engage in vote suppression, a means by which they make it more difficult for the majority to remove them from office and power....
Experts – including Dr. Steven Zeichner, professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the UVA School of Medicine – say myocarditis is not more common post-vaccine than it is post-COVID-19 infection. Vaccine-related myocarditis has been reported in 0.3-5 cases per 100,000 vaccinated people. But direct COVID-related heart injury or myocarditis is found in 1,000–1,400 per 100,000 people with COVID-19.
Biden’s choice could unite Democrats in an election year when the party is expected to lose seats in Congress in the midterms. “This opening comes at an opportune time with Biden’s approval numbers declining and Democrats downright depressed about the party’s midterm prospects,” says Bertrall Ross, a law professor at University of Virginia Law School who served on Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission.
Breyer’s retirement would be politically significant in the U.S. because there are rising fears among Democrats and liberals that the court – which now has a 6-3 conservative majority – is poised to reverse major judicial precedents. Biden’s fellow Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, which under the Constitution must confirm Supreme Court nominees. If Republicans were to win back control of the Senate in the November election, that might foreclose Biden’s ability to name a new justice. “We are so polarized,” Douglas Laycock, a professor of constitutional law at the University o...
Biden’s chance to pick a Supreme Court justice gives the White House an opportunity to tell a positive story, said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “It’s better than what the White House has had to deal with lately,” Kondik said.
“He’s an optimist about what the law can do. He’s an optimist about what the Constitution can do, and he’s an optimist about democracy and how democracy can function and how it can function on behalf of the people,” said Risa Goluboff, dean of the University of Virginia law school, who clerked for Breyer during the 2001 term.
The UVA Medical Center is seeing the highest number of COVID-19 patients than ever before. According to a UVA Health doctor, one in six patients admitted to the hospital have COVID-19 as part of their admission diagnosis. “This morning, 32 patients in the ICU with COVID and 117 total COVID patients are in the hospital, so those are pretty big numbers,” critical care specialist Dr. Kyle Enfield said Wednesday.
I’ve been on the “obesity as a Covid comorbidity” beat for a while now, but the evidence keeps piling up, so I’ll keep sharing it. The latest comes from Arthur Weltman and Siddhartha Angadi, kinesiology professors in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. Here is an excerpt from a recent Q&A with the two.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology has some new guidelines coming out regarding treating brain cancer. According to a release, these guidelines for treating cancers that have spread to the brain are poised to improve care for patients and help increase patient survival rates. The ASCO assembled a panel of experts to come up with these guidelines, including Dr. David Schiff from the UVA Cancer Center.
A local doctor is partnering with other medical professionals to create a new treatment for burns. When you get a burn, the skin around the burn also dies. The team working on this new medication hopes to stop the surrounding skin from dying and prevent grafting. Dr. Mark Roeser, with the UVA School of Medicine, is working with Charlottesville-based Purnovate, a subsidiary of Adial Pharmaceuticals, and started doing research with lung transplants that required medication through an IV.
(Press release) An international collaboration has demonstrated a new way to manipulate and measure subtle atomic vibrations in nanomaterials. This breakthrough could make it possible to develop customized functionalities to improve on and build new technologies. In this research, published in the journal Nature on Jan. 26, the team layered two different oxides into a Lego-like nanostructure called a superlattice. The structures were imaged at the atomic scale by Eric Hoglund, the paper’s first author and a researcher at the University of Virginia.
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business led all schools with an impressive 9.47 average across all 16 questions. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School followed Georgetown with an impressive 9.43 average. Following Wharton was the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce with a 9.26.
The University of Virginia hosted Ambassador Dr. Asad Majeed Khan for a virtual conversation on Pakistan-U.S. relations and regional dynamics in South Asia. The conversation was moderated by UVA’s vice provost for global affairs, Ambassador Steve Mull.
Exposure to extreme hot or cold temperatures may affect the accuracy of home COVID-19 rapid tests, said Dr. Amy Mathers, associate professor of medicine and pathology and associate director of clinical microbiology at the UVA School of Medicine.
[UVA alumna] Danielle Collins reached a Grand Slam final for the first time with a 6-4, 6-1 win over Iga Swiatek at the Australian Open. The 28-year-old American will next face top-ranked Ash Barty for the title at Melbourne Park.
(Video and transcript) Among those interviewed: UVA School of Law Dean Risa Goluboff, a former clerk for Justice Breyer.
(Essay by alumnus Daniel Cozort) I became deeply skeptical of religion as a teenager. In college I became interested in Buddhism, but I took an academic approach so that I could continue to hold it at arm’s length, without full commitment. As a critical student of the Buddhist teachings, I tried my best to find fault with them. But when I began graduate study at the University of Virginia, my mentor was Jeffrey Hopkins, who taught me the sophisticated Gelukpa take on emptiness and dependent arising. It hooked me, because I felt it told the truth. It was like the Western existentialism I’d come...
[UVA alumna] Danielle Collins has played exceptional tennis to reach the semifinals of the Australian Open, but only after achieving the victory of being “able to feel like a normal person.” Less than a year after an endometriosis diagnosis led to the removal of a tennis-ball sized cyst from her uterus, as well as tissue from her bladder and bowels, the 27th-seeded Collins surged past Alizé Cornet, 7-5, 6-1, in a Wednesday afternoon quarterfinal match in Rod Laver Arena.