Good morning, RVA! It's 71 °F, and today’s forecast looks a lot like yesterday’s: Highs around 90 °F and a chance for thunderstorms later in the day and into evening.
Water cooler
Vanessa Remmers in the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes this unreal but extremely, very real story about a local woman who has taken refuge in the First Unitarian Universalist Church to avoid being deported back to Honduras and back to a domestic abuser.
Mark Robinson, also at the RTD, has a dramatic update to the ongoing story of developers attempting to expand the Manchester Historic District 💸. The State decided to delay their decision on the expanding the district until September, and, because of that, the developers are taking their “$250 million” investment and going home. Real estate development is one of the many, many things I know nothing about, but I sure have some skeptical feelings if all it takes is a couple extra months to derail $250 million worth of investment in a neighborhood. The naive and optimistic part of my brain thinks that instead of burning everything to the ground and giving up, maybe the developers and the neighborhoods could use the next three months to build something great together. The more cynical part of my brain says that community engagement is pretty broken in town (both what you should expect as the engager and as those engaged).
Finally from the RTD (another RTD hat-trick!), Tim Dodson and Michael O’Connor have this complicated update to the state-level process towards lowering eviction rates in Virginia’s cities. Two things to note: First, Richmond’s public housing authority takes issue with the earlier RTD analysis of their eviction rates (which, regardless of how you run the numbers, still seems too high); Second, is “tweaking some aspects of tenant rights” enough to get us to where we need to be? Housing people: If you had a magic wand and could “fix” Virginia’s nation-leading eviction rates what policy would you implement at the state level? Finally, remember that this entire discussion kicked off as a result of this piece of reporting in the New York Times by Emily Badger. Journalism!
Plastic straws are bad, and you should feel bad for using them!
Just three more days until the Pulse and the entirely redesigned bus network launch. THREE! WTVR dropped a 30-minute Pulse FAQ video over on their YouTube channel. Check it out if you’ve got Qs.
Dara Lind at Vox, who I think is doing some of the best work covering immigration, has an explanation of the Executive Order that Trump signed yesterday and, more importantly, the impact it will have on migrant families. As with all things Trump, the recent order is not a compassionate policy designed to help the less fortunate, it’s a slight of hand designed to set the table for future xenophobic and white-nationalist policies.
Sports!
- Squirrels beat the Curve, 5-1, and will try to do so again tonight at 6:35 PM. Tickets are available online.
- Nats fell to the Os, 0-3, and finish that series tonight at 7:05 PM.
This morning's longread
How to Kill a Fish
I’m not gonna lie, this was kind of gross—but so is eating things!
After rejecting outright asphyxiation for being cruel, and clubbing the fish by hand for being inefficient and easy to mess up, the institute landed on automated stunners, which they’ve been using ever since. There’s plenty of evidence that killing fish with a blow to the head results in better food. But Tsui wanted to see if using the full ike jime process, including spinal cord destruction, made a significant difference. There were slight differences immediately after death, but a few days after slaughter, the color, texture, and pH levels were about the same, suggesting that a quick, calm death is the most important route to high-grade fish.
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