Good morning, RVA! It's 57 °F, but temperatures are about to drop. Later this morning and into the afternoon you can expect lows in the 30s and the persistent rain to turn into snow. Bundle up before you leave the house, or you’ll regret it!
Water cooler
City Council meets today for their regularly scheduled meeting, and you can find the full agenda here (PDF). Of note in the aforelinked PDF: The meeting minutes from the last couple Navy Hill Development Proposal Work Sessions. Also, I have a long thing I want to write about our Council’s culture of continuing every dang paper for ever and ever, but that’ll have to wait for another time. On this particular agenda you’ll officially find all of the NoBro ordinances, but they’ve all been continued to the January 13th meeting (see!). This, finally, gives us some idea of Council’s timeline for deciding whether to move forward with the project or not. Keep in mind that the Mayor will introduce his budget in the beginning of March, and I imagine that the NoBro Success Budget looks a bit different than the NoBro Failure Budget. Shoutout to all of the City staff who are about to have a bunch more work to do. During the public comment period tonight, keep an eye out for folks speaking about Richmond’s eviction crisis. I’m interested to hear the message and next steps from advocates now that RRHA has decided to freeze evictions until 2020. Anyway, should be a good meeting!
Tonight, Equality Virginia will host a “Ask a Trans Person” panel from 6:30–8:00 PM at the Central Library in Chesterfield County (7051 Lucy Corr Boulevard). This seems like an awesome idea, and thank you to Equality Virginia for providing a safe space for folks to ask questions about what it means to be transgender and how we can all fight for policy that protects our transgender neighbors—looking at you, new Dem majority in the General Assembly. This event is free and open to the public, but you’ve got to register beforehand. Related: Rabbi Michael Knopf has a column in the paper about his work to win nondiscrimination protections for LGBT Virginians through the Virginia Values coalition.
Now that we’ve got a General Assembly packed with Democrats, one of their first orders of biz will be to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Virginia will then become the 38th and final state to ratify the amendment, setting off...some sort of events! The Virginia Mercury’s Ned Oliver has the details on what those events could be (Spoiler: It will most likely involve courts).
Cory Weiner continues to buy up property along Brookland Park Boulevard. Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense says Weiner’s CW Performance Group bought the old Brookland Theatre, which, in my opinion, is a key piece of property on that corridor. No news on what they intend to do with the building, though, but one possibility is to “restore the building to its original use as a theatre.”
I had no idea Nighingale ice cream sandwiches started in the kitchen of Greenleaf’s Pool Room! These are two of my family’s favorite things! Coincidence or indicative of our exceptional taste?
Disney+, the new streaming service that includes content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic, launches today. $6.99/mo. gets you unlimited access to The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, every Star Wars movie, and DuckTales—those alone may be worth worth the price of admission! Polygon has a list of every movie and show available at today’s launch.
This morning's longread
Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits?
“Brain Science” does not sound like a real thing, but I think folks could get some mileage out of this advice.
Even people who score high on self-control questionnaires may owe their apparent virtue to situational factors rather than to sheer fortitude. A study of such people in Germany found that they reported resisting temptation surprisingly rarely. “They were living their lives in a way that hid the marshmallow almost all the time,” Wood writes. This observation leads to the crux of her book’s thesis: the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors. Wood cites the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who argued that behavior was influenced by “a constellation of forces” analogous to gravity or to the fluid dynamics that make a river run faster or slower. Those forces work depending on where you are, who’s around you, the time of day, and your recent actions. We achieve situational control, paradoxically, not through will power but by finding ways to take will power out of the equation.
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