When I was a child, my family travelled often from our home in California to visit relatives in Virginia, where my father has roots that go back more than three centuries. There were great-aunts, ham biscuits, whole afternoons spent on the back porch absorbing family stories. Back then, the state felt like a place crowded with deft politenesses, historic-house museums, and ancestral ghosts. But on recent trips, I’ve noticed that Virginia has become less ye-olde, more global. Its capital, Richmond, which once languidly muffled the merest ripple of the new, has embraced the current artisanal mood, as if recasting the state’s Jeffersonian-farmer roots for the 21st century. “In some ways, it’s hipper than Oakland,” Kristen Green, a writer I know from Richmond, told me.
Kristen was one of several friends…
