Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and after the early morning rain heads out of the area, we’re in for a clouds. Probably no rain, but probably a bunch of clouds. Highs should reach 80 °F, though.
Water cooler
Whoa man, this long piece by Katie O'Connor about the lack of Obamacare insurance options in Virginia is depressing. State officials have just a couple of weeks to nail down an insurance provider or 66,000 folks will most likely end up uninsured. Those folks can blame Congress and the federal government for creating an incredibly unstable and foggy future for the program with their continual attempts to repeal ACA (and there may be another one in the works as we speak). Matthew Yglesias at Vox writes about how all this destabilization inevitably leads to more support of some sort of single-payer system.
The Virginia Department of Education has released their school accreditation reports for the 2017-2018 school year. You can dig into individual school reports with this neat tool that allows you to compare data across the last couple of years and segment it by gender or race or a few other things. You can also check out the report for the entire district and read the press release from the RPS (PDF).
Shalom Farms is awesome, and you should read this profile of them by Colby Rogers in Style Weekly. Keep reading to the end for some news about their next location on the Northside—which, I think, will be the largest urban farm in Virginia.
Ned Oliver at the Times-Dispatch has this interesting story about the Richmond Police Department's plan to ban weapons at Saturday's white supremacy rally at the Lee statue. "Weapons" may or may not include guns, of course, due to our ridiculously lax state gun laws. So while people may be forced to leave their nunchakus at home, they can totally bring all of their AK-47s. Cool. We should learn more at today's 3:30 PM press conference and at tonight's community discussion at First Baptist (2709 Monument Avenue, 6:00 PM). Also of note: Police have added the area around the Coliseum to their no parking zones for the weekend, which, I guess, means there's something planned for that area of town as well?
Speaking of something planned in other areas of town, here are two alternative events to whatever ends up happening at Lee Circle: 1) Richmond Stands United for Racial Justice Rally, and 2) Building a Just Richmond.
P.S. The Afrikana Film Festival begins tonight!
Sports!
- Nats again fell to Atlanta, 2-8. That series wraps up tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
Does Nothing Taste As Good As Skinny Feels?
This Ask A Swole Woman column about disordered eating is great.
The directives the world gives us to eat less and be smaller and weaker are so loud and ubiquitous and unrelenting, it is impossible to live in society as a woman and not second-guess the very food you put in your mouth or each individual inch of your exterior. So many of us, at one point or another, have been slowly dying by our own hands, chipping away at our livelihoods in search of some fictional perfection, often because we feel it’s the only measure of control we can exert in our worlds: to not eat and feel that virtuous, light, lightheaded hollowness; to eat until we’re sick; to exercise until we’re stiff and nauseous and sprained and stress-fractured. When no one listens to us, when they blame our problems on our gender, we turn on ourselves. It makes no sense and perfect sense. They blame us so we blame us too, and we try to fix and punish and cajole and manipulate ourselves through one of our most basic needs.