Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and things sure cooled off after last night's storm. Yet here we are today with highs in the upper 90s and another heat advisory in effect until 7:00 PM. If you dare to go outside this afternoon you can expect heat index values up to 107 °F. That's no joke, so play it cool if you've got things to do outside.
Water cooler
Whoa! The New York Times reports that "federal regulators are expected to authorize a third shot of coronavirus vaccine as soon as Thursday for certain people with weakened immune systems." That's today! Today is Thursday! Since we all know way too much about the approval pathways a vaccine must work its way through, we know that after FDA authorization, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will need to put their stamp on it, followed by the CDC proper. These last two steps usually happen pretty quickly. According to the NYT, this time around immunocompromised is more strictly defined—like, people who have had organ transplants—so it doesn't sound like folks will have to honor-system decide if they qualify. I don't know that this puts us on a quicker path to general public boosters or not, so I'm not sure what this means for most folks. Honestly, the World Health Organization makes a pretty compelling argument for directing worldwide vaccine supply to other countries instead of sinking a signification portion of that into re-vaccinating rich countries with a third shot. I tend to agree!
While we're reading the New York Times about the coronavirus, here's their reporting on the CDC's new, strong recommendations that pregnant and breastfeeding people get vaccinated. Here's the short of it, straight from the CDC's mouth/website: "COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people aged 12 years and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future. Pregnant and recently pregnant people are more likely to get severely ill with COVID-19 compared with non-pregnant people. Getting a COVID-19 vaccine can protect you from severe illness from COVID-19." Also, and because I hear this a lot: "There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men."
Locally, Caitlyn Freeman in the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the entire fourth-grade class at Patrick Henry Elementary School is in quarantine after four students tested positive for COVID-19. It's unclear to me from the article if the four cases are linked or not—meaning did the disease spread inside of the school or did the kids get separately infected elsewhere and bring it in with them. It's scary to have your kid sent home from school due to disease reasons, not to mention it's logistically complex (or impossible) for families who suddenly now have a kid at home for a week or two. I feel a bunch of things about this situation and think we should all probably prepare for a really weird fall. But two things I do think are important to keep in mind while reading this particular story: 1) Patrick Henry is a charter school which means Richmond Public Schools leadership has a different (limited?) relationship to what happens in the school, and 2) Since they went all-virtual last year, RPS as a district has much less practice with in-person pandemic school than the other local districts.
It's not the private, big-biz vaccine mandate that I'm waiting for, but both Capital One and Genworth are requiring employees to be vaccinated if they want to work in the office, reports the RTD's John Reid Blackwell. We'll get one soon enough, though, I'm almost sure of it.
Another sign of the impending Real Weird Fall: The August 18th Wilco + Sleater-Kinney show has been moved from the Altria Theatre to Brown's Island. Not only that, but "the event organizer is requiring that all attendees of this event must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have received a professionally administered negative COVID-19 diagnostic test within 48-hours prior to entry to the event." Given every single previous sentence in this email, I think going about day-to-day life as an unvaccinated person is about to get really annoying (in addition to incredibly risky). The public tolerance of unvaccinated-but-eligible humans has totally shifted in the last two weeks, and it's been really fascinating to watch.
Finally, and it's today's one non-COVID item, there are a lot of really nice post-storm sunset pictures over on /r/rva. Do some scrolling and check a few out this morning.
This morning's longread
The Brash, Exuberant Sounds of Hyperpop
Nothing says "young and with it" like first learning about entire genres of music in The New Yorker!
That term, “hyper-pop,” was such an intuitively accurate way to describe this scene that it eventually became a catchall for the many subgenres, artists, and micro-communities that the PC Music movement helped give rise to. More recently, the experimental duo 100 gecs has honed a delirious, cleverly referential sort of hyperpop. Like PC Music, they confound the corporate centers of the music industry: their songs have drawn fervent fans, but the group is too brash and novel to be easily boxed into any preëxisting musical categories. Still, playlists are the bread and butter of streaming services, and they live and die by legible taxonomies. So in 2019, to address the quandary of 100 gecs’ unlikely popularity and unwieldy style, Spotify launched a new playlist designed to give their sound a home on the platform. It was called “hyperpop.”
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