Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, but today's highs in the mid-80s are a bit warmer than yesterday's cloudy affair. Expect gallons of dry, bright sunshine throughout the day.
Water cooler
The first big public meeting of the Monument Ave Commission takes place tonight, at 6:30 PM, at the Virginia Historical Society (428 N. Boulevard). You can find an agenda, the structure of the meeting, and some rules/regulations here. Ned Oliver says that they'll limit the number of speakers to 50, picked at random—so know that showing up does not guarantee you a speaking slot. If you can't make tonight's soirée, or are not one of the chosen few, there's another meeting on September 13th, and the online feedback form is open to any human with internet access.
This is not great: there are 109 vacant teaching positions in the Richmond Public Schools district because of "the human resources department's failure to return phone calls or answer emails from applicants," Mark Robinson reports. Teachers return on August 23rd and school starts September 5th. I'll tell you what, it's a bummer as a student (and a parent) to begin the year with a long-term sub that gets switched out in the middle of things.
Jackie Kruszewski has a long piece on...parking downtown! You can imagine my excitement, right?? This is a good article to read and learn about all the pieces of Richmond's Parking Pie: a glut of City-subsidized cheap or free street parking, VCU's tax-free status, and the State basically doing whatever it wants so Creigh Deeds doesn't have to parallel park. Also, I can't get enough of the hilarious person-on-the street stories about circling for hours to find a parking spot literally adjacent to a final destination. A reminder: If you walk, bike, or bus to the bar you don't have to park anything anywhere! It's like a magical freedom more of us should take advantage of!
Michael Phillips at the RTD has more details on the process to renegotiate the Washington Training Camp deal. Whether or not the team's charitable contributions and taxes paid to the City are sufficient is something to discuss. While we discuss it, keep in mind that the City has to pay actual cash to an NFL franchise worth $2.95 billion dollars with an annual revenue of $447 million.
I guess we're getting à la carte cable channels after all, just in the form of one million separate streaming video subscriptions. Disney—remember, that's: ESPN, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars—just announced they're starting their own paid streaming service sometime next year and leaving Netflix in 2019.
Sports!
- Squirrels suffered a blanking at the hands of Portland, 0-5. Tickets are available online for tonight's rematch at 6:35 PM.
- Nats kneeled down to the Marlins, 3-7. The series continues tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
How to Deal With North Korea
This was terrifying before I read the breaking news email about North Korea threatening to shoot missiles at Guam.
hat to do about North Korea has been an intractable problem for decades. Although shooting stopped in 1953, Pyongyang insists that the Korean War never ended. It maintains as an official policy goal the reunification of the Korean peninsula under the Kim dynasty. As tensions flared in recent months, fanned by bluster from both Washington and Pyongyang, I talked with a number of national-security experts and military officers who have wrestled with the problem for years, and who have held responsibility to plan and prepare for real conflict. Among those I spoke with were former officials from the White House, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon; military officers who have commanded forces in the region; and academic experts. From these conversations, I learned that the U.S. has four broad strategic options for dealing with North Korea and its burgeoning nuclear program.