Good morning, RVA! It's 63 °F, and today looks generally pleasant with a small chance of rain throughout the morning. Temperatures will warm up a bit over the course of the week as things dry out, so don’t put away your slip-ons quite yet.
Water cooler
It’s Tuesday, and that means coronacounts updates; here are the all-time graphs for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19. Nothing surprising or shocking here, but, while we slide down the backside of the recent delta-induced peak, we still need to do all of the things that help keep each other safe: masking, testing and staying home when you feel sick, and, of course, getting vaccinated if you haven’t yet. I think it’s still too early to tell if our coronagraphs are headed back to summertime lows, or if the next half dozen weeks will look more like the UK’s graphs, which, after a big delta peak, plateaued at winter 2020 levels.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Kenya Hunter has written a three-part series about the history, legacy, and future of segregation at the Maggie Walker Governor’s school. First, “One building, two schools: The legacy of segregation at Maggie Walker;” second, “For 20 years, white students have been accepted into Maggie Walker at a rate nearly four times higher than Black students;” and third, “Officials pledge progress on equity after governor’s school bill falters; another never got a hearing.” A lot of work went into these pieces, and I’m thankful for Hunter for putting together this narrative of how racism is so deeply built into many of our systems. The third and final piece looks at how the General Assembly tried (and failed) to change the way admissions work and increase the number of Black and Brown students attending the State’s Governor’s Schools. I think State involvement is really the only way to make cohesive steps towards more equitable enrollment, whether that’s through the GA or, as Anne Holton suggests, reforming how the school boards work. Either way, the outcome of the upcoming gubernatorial election will certainly have a lot to say about whether or not we continue working to dismantle this particular inequity.
Let that previous paragraph be your reminder to register to vote if you have not! Today, October 12th, is the very final day to register to vote by mail, in-person, or online. Please do so!
I can’t tell what’s going on with the Virginia Redistricting Commission, but Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has an update from a tumultuous Friday meeting and what sounds like a more peaceful Monday meeting. I don’t love that “Monday’s meeting was nonetheless dominated by grousing” or that it sounds like they’re about to give up on drawing maps for General Assembly districts, but the Commission will at least attempt to draw some Congressional maps this week. After Friday’s meeting it didn’t sound like even that was a safe bet. The Commission will meet again on Thursday—until then!
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has big naming news: “The City of Richmond announced Monday that it has begun marketing the redevelopment of what it has now formally dubbed as ‘The Diamond District,’ the 67-acre, largely city-owned assemblage along Arthur Ashe Boulevard made up in part by land where The Diamond, the Arthur Ashe Junior Athletic Center and Sports Backers Stadium currently stand.” Diamond District is, of course, my preferred name for the area, and I’ve been using it since back in February when Twitter user @dasFlaneur suggested something similar. This is _so_ much better than “Greater Scott’s Addition” or “Scott’s Addition 2.0 (the even worse Henrico version). Great work, everyone. You can check out the City’s Diamond District page here, which includes some info about the upcoming Request for Interest for developing those 67 prime, city-owned acres of land. The City hopes to issue the RFI by the end of this year.
This morning's patron longread
On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
Submitted by Patron Susan. More and more reasons to rethink how we use social media and why we give it such a prominent slice of our brainspace.
In the same way that electricity went from a luxury enjoyed by the American élite to something just about everyone had, so, too, has fame, or at least being known by strangers, gone from a novelty to a core human experience. The Western intellectual tradition spent millennia maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private—embedding it in law and politics, norms and etiquette, theorizing and reinscribing it. With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade. That’s not to say the experience of being known, paid attention to, commented on by strangers, is in any sense universal. It’s still foreign to most people, online and off. But now the possibility of it haunts online life, which increasingly is just life.
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