Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and today's temperatures are chillin' back in the 60s. Cloudy today, but no rain: It looks like Monday has a case of the Mondays.
Water cooler
Richmond's City Council meets tonight at 6:00 PM (4:00 PM for the juicy informal meeting where you'll hear Senior Policy Advisor Thad Williamson go over the mayor's new Education Compact). On the agenda (PDF) are some cool bike-related projects: the 1st and 2nd Street buffered bike lanes and the 29th Street bike walk boulevard (however, according to this piece by Ned Oliver, the former will be continued due to some concerns with the (lack of) public outreach). ORD. 2017-019 removes parking lots as a primary use in the B-4 and B-5 zoning districts. This seems boring, but makes it harder to buy up land downtown and build big surface parking lots. That's not boring at all! The sole item remaining on the regular agenda is ORD. 2017-022 (PDF) which allows the city to accept the one-time implementation costs for the Richmond Transit Network Plan from the state. I do not know why this is on the regular agenda instead of the consent agenda, but I did get the stress sweats when I saw that.
If you couldn't get tickets to this past weekend's Christine Darden event, Katie Demeria at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the recap you are looking for. Darden fell in love with geometry and taught herself trigonometry!? It's a tale as old as time!
The Richmond International Film Festival begins today, and you can still get tickets right here. This year they've switched things up and, in addition to a ton of really great films to check out, there are a ton of really great bands to stand adjacent to with your arms crossed while you nod your head (live music isn't my thing, you guys).
If you can handle it, you can watch the cluster that was the Best Picture announcement at last night's Oscars. Gah, the sympathy anxiety is intense. Here's the complete list of winners—including Mahershala Ali for Actor in a Supporting Role and Viola Davis for Actress in a Supporting Role.
Sports!
- The Rams of Richmond fell to the Rams of Rhode Island, 59-69.
- Spiders took down the Rams of Fordham, 70-48.
- Hokies beat Boston College, 91-75. They'll host the Hurricanes at 9:00 PM.
- Hoos handled North Carolina State, 70-55, and will welcome North Carolina regular tonight at 7:00 PM.
This morning's longread
On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right
This is an intense read that'll give you some context to Milo Yiannopoulos, who you probably heard about a ton last week.
It seems perfunctory to point out the hypocrisy of building a movement and a career on the back of insulting people — Muslims, migrants, women, people of color — while nursing a hair-trigger sensitivity to any personal attack you haven’t pre-approved. That hypocrisy, though, does not appear self-evident to anyone within this movement, because a fundamental tenet of far-right pro-trolling is that it’s only other people’s feelings that are frivolous. Their own feelings, by contrast, including the capacity to feel shame when they’re held accountable for their actions, are so momentous that infringing them is tantamount to censure, practically fascism in and of itself. These are men, in short, who have founded an entire movement on the basis of refusing to handle their emotions like adults.