Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and highs today should hit the mid 60s. Spring! Hello!
Water cooler
The General Assembly returns to Richmond today to begin working through their budget impasse and, fingers crossed, expand Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of Virginians. Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch says Governor Northam has done some good strategy moves to force the hands of holdout Republicans, but, I’ll be honest, I had to read this article a couple of times to understand the Governor’s play here. To continue being honest, I don’t really understand why he doesn’t deploy this strategy all the time on everything. I’m bad at state government, y’all. If you’re hoping for a quick end to this budget business, read to the end of the piece for one possible timeline.
Just yesterday I linked to the Justin Mattingly article about Richmond’s move to rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School, and today I link to this Mattingly article about Hanover County’s 5-2 vote against renaming Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School. I take issue with framing the results of an online survey as “the majority of county residents,” though. Only 13,000 people responded while Hanover is a county of more than 100,000 folks—plus anyone living anywhere could fill out the survey. Anyway, the vote by the current school board is unsurprising, but needing to flip two votes is easier than needing to flip four. Onward!
Here’s yet another link to an article by Justin Mattingly! Is he at all places at all times? Maybe! This piece recapping Monday’s RPS School Board meeting (the same meeting at which the Board decided to move forward on changing the name of J.E.B. Stuart Elementary) is filled with interesting bits of information. First, Superintendent Kamras presented a timeline for building new schools—not, like, a theoretical timeline, this time line begins immediately! Second, and this is an open question, who should have the responsibility of designing and building new schools? City Council or School Board? Third and unrelated to the article, but I wish the School Board’s BoardDocs website was as nice as the City’s Legistar website.
I’ve been waiting for this Edwin Slipek piece about why we should save the Intermediate Terminal Warehouse No. 3, and I gotta say, I still don’t know if it’s worth saving. Here’s where I stand at the moment (until I flip-flop to somewhere else): Stone has an agreement with the City to save the building and that should be honored, but I’m kind of meh about the building itself.
P.S. I got City Council’s latest budget work session posted to The Boring Show. You can subscribe on your pod device right here.
Sports!
- Squirrels handled Hartford, 8-6. They’ll try for the sweep tonight at 7:05 PM, take tomorrow off, and then welcome Reading for the home opener on Friday!
- Nats beat the Braves, 4-1, and wrap that series up today at 1:05 PM.
This morning's longread
What About “The Breakfast Club”?
From Patron Alexis comes this piece by Molly Ringwald about Molly Ringwald movies (well, about the movies she made with John Hughes).
I made three movies with John Hughes; when they were released, they made enough of a cultural impact to land me on the cover of Time magazine and to get Hughes hailed as a genius. His critical reputation has only grown since he died, in 2009, at the age of fifty-nine. Hughes’s films play constantly on television and are even taught in schools. There is still so much that I love in them, but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now. When my daughter proposed watching “The Breakfast Club” together, I had hesitated, not knowing how she would react: if she would understand the film or if she would even like it. I worried that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me.
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