Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and highs today, while still hot, are "only" in the upper 80s. There's a fairly good chance for thunderstorms for most of the afternoon, so keep an eye out and a raincoat at the ready.
Water cooler
Primary Day is past, and while Corey Stewart has yet to concede, the ballot for November is set. At the top of the ticket, Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie won their nominations—VPAP has the rest of results for you to poke around in on a lovely map. Locally, Antoinette Irving and Nichole Ona Armstead will be the Democratic nominees for Sheriff and Treasurer respectively. It's scary that a blatantly bigoted candidate like Stewart, who raised just $990k compared to Ed Gillespie's almost $5 million, was able to pull within 4,500 votes of the Republican nomination. Most likely this will pull Candidate Gillespie down toward the Confederate-Flag-waving, pseudo-but-sometimes-blatantly White supremacy wing of the Republican party—that's the scary part. The reassuring part is that the turnout gap between Democrats and Republicans was massive. Almost more folks voted for Ralph Northam than voted for both Republican front runners combined.
Del. Delores McQuinn, who easily won her primary yesterday, has an OpEd in RVA Mag about Richmond's historic (and forgotten) Black cemeteries. She talks about her legislation that won funding for maintenance of Evergreen and East End Cemeteries and has some biting words for the nearby Oakwood Confederate cemetery: "...Oakwood Cemetery, for example, is the resting place of Confederate soldiers whose graves are cleaned, tombstones are washed and plots are adorned with flags of secession, discrimination and racial segregation."
Here's a disturbing story in USA Today: Trump called the mayor of Tangier Island to tell him not to worry about climate change as his island not-so-slowly slips into the Bay. You can read about just how not-so-slowly that's happening in this New York Times piece from last year. I for one will welcome the former residents of Tangier Island to Richmond as some of Virginia's first climate refugees.
Today is Flag Day. The most interesting thing I got out of reading the Wikipedia page about it) was that "Colonial Dames" is a way cooler name for a group than the "Daughters of the American Revolution."
Matt Peace at the LA Times writes about how Jeff Sessions's Foghorn Leghorn style of speaking confounded senators at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday. It's an apt comparison: Foghorn Leghorn was based on a radio character named Senator Beauregard Claghorn.
Sports!
- Squirrels got blanked by New Hampshire, but will do better tonight at 6:35 PM—assuming the weather holds. Get your tickets online.
- Nats beat Atlanta, 10-5, busting their losing streak. That series wraps up this afternoon at 4:05 PM.
This morning's longread
White Men
When race keeps intruding into your romances, you start to wonder why. You look for patterns. I used to think the problem with white men is that they want control, a childish and obvious hankering. They’re used to it, socialized to seek it. But over time, I started to believe that the problem is that they’re unformed, shapeless. White men have had nothing to battle against or fight for; their identity is this amorphous default. They ooze around, taking up space. They manspread and mansplain. Even the ones who know better mandream on the sly. It always breaks my heart when I get wind of my white boyfriends’ secret fantasies: to rescue, to rebel, to rule. Every single one of them wants to own a motorcycle. It’s all so boring. It’s all just history.