Good morning, RVA! It's 46 °F, and it is WINDY. There’s an active wind advisory until 6:00 AM on Saturday, and you can expect winds from 20–30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph. Hold on to your hats! Literally!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s John Boyer says we’ve got a “rapidly developing nor’easter” and has the details on when the winds should die down. I made a joke about hats earlier, but this kind of wind is serious business—so much so that several school districts in other parts of the state have closed!
Water cooler
Two exciting bits of bike lane news! Richmond’s very first protected bike lane is now open and ready for riders on Fairfield Way in the East End. Also, construction begins on the Franklin Street Cycle Track on March 19th. This bike lane, also protected by posts, stretches from Pine Street to 9th Street and gives people on bikes a safe east-west way to get around town. We’ve had a too-long drought in new bike lanes hitting the pavement, so it’s nice to finally see some progress!
Justin Mattingly at the RTD says Richmond Public Schools will organize their own march in support of the victims of the Parkland school shooting on March 24th—this coincides with the national March For Our Lives event. He’s also got a tiny bit of the details about what should happen if students participate in either the #Enough school walkout on March 14th or the National School Walkout on April 20th.
Whoa! Check out these plans for a new development on the eastern end of Brookland Park Boulevard (PDF)! 76 units and only 19 parking spaces fills my heart with joy—plus the Special Use Permit application notes the proximity of two frequent bus lines and shows how far you can get from the development in 5, 10 and 15 minute walks (aka the walkshed). Additionally, all of these units will be affordable to those making between 40–60% of the Area Median Income (PDF). This seems pretty solid!
Alert: ZZQ Texas Craft Barbeque opens this weekend in Scott’s Addition, according to J. Elias O’Neal in Richmond BizSense. I...don’t think I have the words to describe how their brisket makes me feel.
This Sunday, the Virginia War Memorial will host a free showing of A League of Their Own at the Byrd Theatre to kick off Women’s History Month. History! Baseball! Ladies! Tom Hanks’s shouting voice!
I don’t know anything about how steel and aluminum tariffs will impact the world, but this WaPo article sure makes it sound like Trump’s chaotic evil alignment is not great for the world’s economies.
Sports!
The Atlantic-10 Women’s basketball tournament quarterfinals begin today at the Richmond Coliseum. VCU got bounced in the first round, but #8 Richmond matches up with #1 Dayton at 11:00 AM.
- Rams head to Fordham for the final game of the regular season on Saturday at 2:00 PM.
- Spiders take on George Mason on Saturday at 7:00 PM.
- Hokies finish out their regular season in Miami on Saturday at 12:00 PM.
- Wahoos held on to beat Louisville, 67-66 and will wrap up their regular season by hosting Notre Dame on Saturday at 4:00 PM.
This morning's longread
Monica Lewinsky: Emerging from “the House of Gaslight” in the Age of #MeToo
This is a great piece of writing by Monica Lewinsky.
But as I find myself reflecting on what happened, I’ve also come to understand how my trauma has been, in a way, a microcosm of a larger, national one. Both clinically and observationally, something fundamental changed in our society in 1998, and it is changing again as we enter the second year of the Trump presidency in a post-Cosby-Ailes-O’Reilly-Weinstein-Spacey-Whoever-Is-Next world. The Starr investigation and the subsequent impeachment trial of Bill Clinton amounted to a crisis that Americans arguably endured collectively—some of us, obviously, more than others. It was a shambolic morass of a scandal that dragged on for 13 months, and many politicians and citizens became collateral damage—along with the nation’s capacity for mercy, measure, and perspective.
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