Good morning, RVA! It's 25 °F, and that's dang cold! You can expect the temperature to creep above freezing this afternoon—but just barely.
Water cooler
Here's something to watch: Folks in Hanover are organizing around changing the names of Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School, the RTD's Michael O'Connor reports. When Henrico renamed Harry F. Byrd Middle School a while back, it was due to some strong, student-lead organizing. As a side note, the principal not allowing the Lee-Davis school paper to publish a story about renaming the school because it had not "fairly represented both sides of the issue" seems garbagey. This sounds a lot like what journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen calls The View From Nowhere. It's a problem in national, local, and, apparently, even student-run media. How about this: If Lee-Davis is unwilling to let students publish a story about changing that school's name, I'll offer some space here to make that happen. I am certainly not a journalist, and I don't know how many people in Hanover read this email, but I am more than willing to work with students from Lee-Davis on reporting, editing, and publishing a piece about renaming their school. If anyone has connections to those students, hit me up!
On a kind of related tip, Brandon Fox is leaving Style Weekly and has a list of things she loves about Richmond's restaurant scene. How's that related to a high school named after Confederate generals? Brandon says our veneration of Confederate monuments, not the quality of food or chefs, keeps the City from gaining the national recognition that's deserved. Yes, I agree! These monuments most certainly have an impact on tourism, and it's not a positive one—just look to last night in Alabama for evidence of changing times.
Hey! Look what showed up in my inbox yesterday: Video of the first Education Compact meeting from this past Monday. I haven't watched it yet because I was too busy alternating between ignoring the election in Alabama while watching Dark and voraciously consuming every tweet I could about the election in Alabama. I hear we can expect a real digital home for Education Compact stuff at some point, too.
The RTD's Tammie Smith has a fascinating update to the sexual-harassment-fueled turmoil going on at the Martin Agency. CEO Matt Williams, who is not the same person as former Chief Creative Officer Joe Alexander, has been replaced by Kristen Cavallo, the first woman to lead the agency. I'm not trying to speculate about anything, but it's rad of the Martin Agency's parent group to put a woman in charge at this moment in time.
Style Weekly's Brent Baldwin and Scott Elmquist have put together their list of what to remember from 2017. Some of this stuff seems like eons ago!
Democrat Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in Alabama's Senate election last night. Moore has refused to conceded, but the margin of victory may be too great for him to requests a recount. Also, if you haven't seen them yet, take a minute to look at these graphs of the early exit poll data. 96% of Black voters voted for Jones, compared to just 30% of White voters. Thank you to the vast, vast majority of Black Alabamian voters.
FYI, if you would like to attend the inauguration of Ralph Northam (that's January 13th), you need to request tickets ASAP!
This morning's longread
Raising a Teenage Daughter*
Here's a piece written by a mother and annotated by her daughter. I love annotations and wish there was a Genius.com but for boring, civic PDFs.
It’s a tough task. How well do you know your child? How well do you know the situations your child is getting into? What makes it all seem so impossible is that you need to allow your child to get hurt because if you don’t, your child won’t be resilient and will definitely be an ass. But we’re not talking about losing at Candy Land. We’re talking about … it’s hard to say out loud.
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