Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, but today's highs will stretch way into the mid 80s. Yesssss!
Water cooler
Richmond Police have identified the second victim in Saturday's double homicide. Officers arrived at the 4000 block of Midlothian Turnpike and found Kejuan L. Goode, 18, and Terrell D. Thomas, 20, shot to death. Police are still searching for a suspect.
Michael Paul Williams devotes his entire column today to the recent murders in Mosby Court—six so far on the year, a little less than a third of the city's total. Here's Williams: "Given that living conditions have not improved in these communities, it was foolish to think violent crime would disappear. Richmond will never reach its full potential until we adequately tend to residents mired in economic deprivation and traumatized by constant assaults of violence and loss."
Yesterday, we looked at the press's take on the mayor's first 100 days in office. If you'd like to hear it straight from the man himself, here's a video and accompanying press release from the mayor's office released that lists out his achievements over the first 100 days.
Mark Robinson at Richmond Magazines says RPS will try and incentivize teachers to...not take their leave time? Am I reading that right? Are employees "absent" if they're taking leave? Here's a 29-page PDF of the existing leave policy if anyone wants to dig in.
The Post Office on 25th in Church Hill abruptly shut down due to "several safety issues." First, what kind of issues could exist in a post office that cause it to be immediately shut down without warning? Actually, I bet the folks at Mobelux, who recently bought and renovated the New Deal-era post office on Broad Street could tell you a thing or two about safety issues in old and crumbly USPS buildings. Second, existing PO Box customers can pick up their mail through a mobile mail unit, which I didn't know was a thing and looks like an ice cream truck but for mail.
I'm just going to quote the photo caption from this Richmond Magazine article by Stephanie Breijo, "Dragon's Breath, one of Sweet Turtle's most popular items, adds liquid nitrogen to Crunch Berries and other cereals for a cold, crunchy treat that emulates a dragon exhaling smoke." I'm interested in the impeding Frog vs. Turtle turf war.
Vox has the full list of Pulitzer Prize winners, which includes David Fahrenthold for his rad pen-and-paper investigation into Trump's lack of philanthropy.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Altoona, 1-2, and pick it back up tonight at 6:35 PM. First 1,000 fans at the game get a free "Outdoorsman Hat presented by Coca-Cola."
- Nats beat the Cardinals, 14-6, and will continue the series tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
The Forgotten Black Woman Behind Betty Boop
Perhaps it’s fitting that Betty Boop is best known in black and white. Her character itself is obviously white, yet would be inconceivable without black artistic tradition — and the same is true of America as a whole. Betty Boop is an indelible icon of the Jazz Age; jazz, which developed partly out of classical music, was created by African-American artists. In 1970 in Time magazine, responding to a peculiarly tone-deaf question from a reader who wanted to know what America would look like without black people, Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, argued that America would not, could not, be America without black people. The query was an “absurdity,” a “fantasy”; to varying degrees, Ellison declared, almost every aspect of the country — from slang to music to economic injustice to the existence of iconic American writers like Twain or Faulkner — is inextricably intertwined not only with the legacy of slavery but with African-American cultural production, yet these ties are all too often forgotten, if not deliberately obscured. That the white Kane took the black Jones’s style of singing and attempted to claim it as her own is one of the most common, frustrating narratives in America.