Good morning, RVA! It's 71 °F, and, while we may avoid rain today, the heat continues! Expect highs in the mid 90s and triple-digit Feels Likes. Make sure you keep your plants—and your body—sufficiently watered.
Water cooler
Late last week, the New York Times reported that the FDA "is pushing to approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose COVID-19 vaccine on Monday." That's today! When talking about vaccine hesitancy, I hear a lot of folks point to how the current vaccines are all administered under an Emergency Use Authorization, not full approval. While I definitely do think a non-trivial number of folks really have been waiting for full approval to get their shot, I also realize that many Hard Nos will just move the goal posts and find another reason to reject vaccination. Still, full approval is a big deal in my mind, mostly because I anticipate way more employers feeling comfortable with instituting vaccine mandates. "Full approval" is mostly an intellectual reason to get vaccinated, but losing your job is an incredibly practical reason to go ahead and schedule a vaccination appointment.
Reed Williams at the Richmond Times-Dispatch looks back in on the Belt Atlantic three months after a fatal shooting there killed a 3-month-old child. I feel emotions about the amount of supportive community involvement in the Belt Atlantic since the shooting—both public and private. However, this article also (obviously) underscores our broken gun violence laws in America, and (less obviously) our broken affordable housing policies in Virginia.
WTVR reports that a driver killed a person riding their bike on Hull Street near Southside Plaza early Sunday morning. I have no idea about the particulars of this fatal crash, but I do know that section of Hull Street is way too wide and way too fast. I also know that your chance of dying from a crash goes way, way up the higher the speeds involved.
Richmond BizSense's Mike Platania reports that the State's Department of General Services is thinking about tearing down the Monroe Building—Richmond's tallest and most brutalist building. I'd be lying if I said I weren't sad about potentially losing such a brutal and visible landmark. But, I get that needs change. Maybe its replacement can be easier to access and include less parking!
If you dare, you can learn more and leave feedback on the draft version of ConnectRVA 2045, the long-range, regional transportation plan. This is really, really regional and really, really long-range, which, at least for me, makes it really, really hard to know enough to leave informed feedback. While the video on the aforelinked page does a good job at selling the multimodal aspects of the plan, page 86 of the plan itself will give it to you straight: 66% of the funding and 69% of the projects are highway-related. Our regional leaders, faced with an ever worsening climate crisis, have decided to spend almost three times as much on road widening projects than on transit. As with so many things these days, this is shocking but not surprising. Public meetings on ConnectRVA 2045 start this week (August 25th at the Ashland Branch Library) and continue through the middle of September. You can also fill out a short survey with your thoughts and feelings.
This morning's longread
Bama Rush TikTok, explained and explained and explained
I like this Vox explainer about Bama Rush TikTok mostly for how it acknowledges the blinding speed at which Internet Time moves. Also, I find the accents in all of these videos wonderfully charming.
So I watched TikTok, specifically TikToks made by the incoming freshman class of the University of Alabama, who were in the middle of sorority recruitment. At that point, this particular niche — known as Bama Rush TikTok — was beginning to become a bit of a thing in the wider culture, so I made sure to save every related video I saw on my For You page and seek out more, figuring that come Monday, I’d have something to say about it. Well, I have several angles in mind, but frankly, plenty has already been written about it by pretty much every website that covers this sort of thing. In internet time, Bama Rush peaked last week, so I’m already late; that’s just the speed at which we live these days.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
