Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and you should expect snow today. We are under a Winter Weather Advisory until 6:00 PM this evening—so please be careful if you’re out and about.
As of this moment: Chesterfield and Henrico Public Schools are closed. Richmond Public Schools are operating on a 2-hour delay. VCU will open at 10:00 AM.
Water cooler
Justin Mattingly at the Richmond-Times Dispatch has some personnel news out of Richmond Public Schools: The Superintendent has picked his cabinet. Superintendent Kamras told City Council this last week and and now we see that it’s true, but his new, smaller cabinet costs the District about $200,000 less than the previous administration’s team. However, with one spot left to be filled, you get the feeling that this will ultimately be a cost-neutral cabinet (unless I’m bad at math). I’ll tell you what though, the fact that these appointments squeaked by on a 5-4 vote does not show me that the new Superintendent has the trust of the School Board yet—and much more consequential and difficult conversations lay ahead. 1st District School Board member Liz Doerr voted for the cabinet positions and details her reasoning over on her Medium. I agree with a lot of the words in that post and feel pretty strongly that as long as dudeman has kept things cost-neutral, we should let him do his thing as he gets his bearings. Anyway, I’m really interested in how the Superintendent-School Board working relationship changes over the next year or so.
Laura Ingles at Style Weekly has a piece looking back at last week’s school walkout and looking forward to this weekend’s March for Our Lives. Ingle’s focus on our city’s persistent gun violence, which has not happened in schools but in our streets and neighborhoods, is exactly right: Just this month two high school students were shot, one fatally, in the City’s East End. Gun violence impacts so many of us and our neighbors! We need our state legislators to have the courage to introduce and pass courageous gun violence legislation. Aim for the stars, y’all, and let’s shift the Overton Window back towards gun sanity.
Genevelyn Steele in Richmond Magazine has the details about what the heck’s going on at the empty lot on Brook Road south of Laburnum—it’s a farm! This gives Northside two urban farms right off Brook Road. I enjoy this story because it supports the incontrovertible fact that Alabama fans are the most intense of all college football fans.
A dense residential development is coming to a part of W. Broad Street that will have real bus service in the very near future, says BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers. Keep your eye out for for more Broad Street infill like this.
Alert! We have an empanada restaurant! Richard Hayes at RVAHub has a picture of the menu. Hand pies for life.
It took some doing, part of which involved “ffmpeg” and “the command line,” but the March 19th City Council Budget Work Session is now up on the Boring Show! You can, of course, subscribe to this most boring of podcasts by pointing your podcast app of choice at this URL.
This morning's longread
The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex
Everything you wanted to know about Tex-Mex...and more!
Chili, on the other hand, was originally popularized by women, most of them Tejanas or Mexican — San Antonio’s long-lost chili queens — though they go unmentioned in the state resolution. Whatever the chili lobby’s original aims, it ensured that Texas cuisine was officially represented by a food that spoke to the state’s Mexican roots. And chili con carne, even if it’s now out of style, has had the kind of cultural impact Texas barbecue brisket is only beginning to dream of: Chili was the first and most famous manifestation of the robust, misunderstood, supposedly inauthentic and staggeringly influential cuisine that we now call Tex-Mex.
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