Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and rain is on the way. Along with the rain, expect temperatures to drop slightly from now until the weekend.
Water cooler
Whenever I'm all "Blah blah blah frequent buses really matter," and you're all "What? Why? I just want to take the bus to Mekong," remember this piece by Mark Robinson in Richmond Magazine. The transit problem for this particular RPS student (who's open-enrolled into Thomas Jefferson High School and uses GRTC to get to there from the Northside) isn't that he's got to take two buses to school, it's that his second bus is infrequent. If he misses it, he's screwed, and this is exactly the sort of thing that frequency can help with. The other problem, which while not a transit problem is still super serious, is that we should not be forcing students to pay for their own GRTC passes to get to school. Lots of cities around the country provide bus passes for students, and, with all of the new bus improvements opening up this year, Richmond should start thinking about doing the same.
It's exciting, at least for me, to see the Richmond Times-Dispatch covering the Jeff Davis Corridor in Chesterfield County—a complex place disconnected from the logistics of life in a bunch of different ways. Vanessa Remmers has the details on a new County-sponsored plan for the area and includes thoughts from yours truly about how we can better connect the Northern Jeff Davis Corridor to the rest of the region. I bet you can guess how I think that should happen (🚌!).
Paul Spencer at Style Weekly has this wonderful piece about The Workshop underneath VCU's Cabell Library. A service provided by the library has been co-opted by cosplayers to create some truly marvelous things, and I can't support that enough!
Nakell Williams at WRIC says Petersburg will consider renaming their J.E.B Stuart Elementary School. We've got one of those in the City, too, and we should definitely work to rename it!
This is nice: "Car salesman donates $5,000 to help fix smelly bathroom at Richmond school. Now, let's get 40-some other car salespeople to donate $5,000 to the rest of the RPS schools!
The RTD editorial board asks "After the town hall temper tantrums, then what?" Uhhh we elect a bunch of new, more responsible congresspeople that aren't willing to leave millions of people without health insurance? I thought that was clear? Maybe they're still missing the point and we need to be louder and angrier at the town halls?
This Washington Post article about how and why Trump fired Comey is great. Here's the best part: "When asked Tuesday night for an update on the unfolding situation, one top White House aide simply texted a reporter two fireworks emoji." 🎆🎆, indeed.
Also in the WaPo, the mayor of New Orleans writes about why he's taking down that city's Confederate monuments. He says, "We must always remember our history and learn from it. However, that doesn’t mean we must valorize the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal — literally — in our most prominent public places." Yes!
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Altoona, 3-10, and hit the road to face Bowie tonight at 6:35 PM.
- Nats beat the Os, 7-6, and will finish up that series tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
Tragedy, Swipe Left
There’s an aphorism in the tech community that says, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” meaning, essentially, that the unintended quirks of your product design come to be the attributes that most distinguish it. In the case of dating apps that feature is unlimited choice, which has the perverse effect of enabling you to avoid making decisions altogether. They inflate your expectations in inverse proportion to your capacity for emotional commitment. I mean, why can’t you just swipe yourself a partner to replace your dead father, to comfort your traumatized mother, to distract yourself from the pain of adult life? Why choose one person when you could choose anyone? Because, what about her? Or her, or her?