Good morning, RVA! It's 68 °F, and highs today should hit the mid 80s. Expect plenty of clouds, but a generally rain-free and warm day.
Water cooler
Robert Zullo has some good follow up on Mosby Court, including an interview with RRHA CEO T.K. Somanath. There's some useful information in there about how Richmond's public housing works—who's allowed to live there, who's not, how you get banned, and how that all is enforced. However, I don't agree with the vibe of the article's conclusion, that it's "up to the tenants to speak up." We can't place the responsibility for deconcentrating urban poverty on folks that live there and often have no alternative. Related: While I'm kind of into the idea of a Marshall Plan for Mosby Court, I really dislike the language of "fixing." Words are important, and people aren't problems to be solved. Also, we need a plan—as T.K. Somanath said in the previous article—to deconcentrate poverty across the entire city, not just in Mosby Court. Double related: The Mayor was out in the neighborhood yesterday talking to residents and playing some basketball. Triple related: Delegate Bourne will use the violence in Mosby Court, part of his district, to push for gun violence laws in the General Assembly.
Edwin Slipek at Style Weekly has this wonderful look at Richmond's brutalist buildings. Why did we build things this way for so long!? All of these structures feel oppressive to walk next to...I guess intentionally? I think my "favorite" brutalist view in town is this one from out front of the James Monroe building.
Ladies of Lager is an excellent name for a beer group.
RIP Bellytimber nachos. I've made many life decisions over your heaping plates of chips, beans, and cheese.
If you're just waking up, you missed the time the President of America tweeted "Despite the constant negative press covfefe". For about six hours, #covfefe Twitter was a really fun place to be.
Sports!
- Squirrels got crushed by Hartford, 2-12. They'll try to make it up tonight at 7:05 PM.
- Nats felled the Giants, 6-3, and wrap up that series tonight at 10:15 PM.
This morning's longread
A young Wikipedia editor withstood a decade of online abuse. Now she’s fighting back — on Wikipedia itself.
As Temple-Wood well knew, it takes a special kind of person to invest their free time in improving this free resource, and for this reason, biases abound. About 90 percent of Wikipedia’s editors are male, so the encyclopedia’s 5.32 million articles tend to skew toward the achievements and interests of men. So to thumb her nose at her harassers, she started the Women Scientists WikiProject, to improve the quality and coverage of biographies of notable achievers in this field. “Unfortunately, part of Wikipedia’s systemic bias is that women in science are woefully underrepresented. Let’s change that!” reads a note at the top of the project page. The community now includes 90 editors.