"Congress has forgotten to serve the people they represent." -- Lisa Vedernikova Khanna I often ask myself, what is the American Dream? Is it the white picket fence and a two-and-a-half-kid household? Maybe you picture the Statue of Liberty welcoming new arrivals to a...
Richmond has the third-slowest mail delivery rate of any United States metro area. But if you live here, you already know that. Rachel Westfall, who lives in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood, says her mail service has always been hit or miss. But since April, there have been a lot more misses. “My personal property tax check apparently never...
Virginia state Senator-elect Ghazala Hashmi will be the first Muslim to serve in Virginia's legislature, and a lot of racists on social media just can't stop crying about it. Days after Virginia’s legislative elections, racist comments continued to flood news stories about Ghazala Hashmi becoming the first Muslim American to serve in the state...
Nearly 100,000 Virginia children live in high-poverty neighborhoods; that figure includes 15 percent of Virginia's African American children, but only 2 percent of the commonwealth's white children. African American children are more than seven times as likely as white children in Virginia to live in “concentrated poverty” — neighborhoods where...
In the run-up to today's election, political candidates are trying all sorts of novel ways to reach young voters -- including, yes, ads on Snapchat. A candidate for sheriff in a rural Virginia county is trying to reach younger voters by advertising on a social media platform popular with their age group — Snapchat. William Stowell is an...
The Virginia Beer Wholesalers Association, which distributes many of Richmond's favorite craft brews, is also the seventh-largest political donor in the state this year; a slight majority of its donations go to Republicans. On a chilly fall night in the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, just ahead of the statewide Virginia election,...
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau insists that individual states, not the federal government, should regulate payday loans. But here in Virginia, payday loans are very weakly regulated, with no upper limit on interest rates. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has not budged on its June decision cutting additional protections. “There...
Coates, author of new novel The Water Dancer, came to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture to discuss the legacies of emancipation. Author and Maryland native Ta-Nehisi Coates visited Richmond last week to discuss emancipation and to promote his New York Times bestseller, The Water Dancer. The book is set in Virginia, but his work isn’t the...
Your vote should count, even if you have to mail it in. Don't be late! Virginia voters have already returned more absentee ballots in 2019 than in the November 2015 election -- the last time all 140 seats in the General Assembly were up for reelection. In the last few elections there has been an uptick in absentee ballots, but not all returned...
In William Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, MS, the killing of a black woman in her own home by a white police officer shows that, as Faulkner once wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." An African-American woman named Dominique Clayton was killed in her Oxford, Mississippi home on Sunday, May 19. She was shot early that morning, in...
