Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and the humid heat will stick around for another couple days. Relief arrives on Wednesday or Thursday, but, for today, expect highs in the mid 90s and plenty of sweat.
Scary but also weather-related, the Washington Post has a Hurricane Ida liveblog detailing the destruction and damage caused by the storm over the last 24 hours. They’ll continue to update this, I imagine, as the sun rises and folks get a better sense of the situation.
Water cooler
The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Sabrina Moreno reports on how Richmond’s racial and economic disparities play out into vaccine uptake disparities. Here’s the big takeaway: “Wealthier and predominantly white census tracts in Richmond and Henrico County have 2 to 5 times the vaccination rates of low-income areas with mostly Black and Latino residents.” I think a lot of overlapping issues contribute to these low vaccination rates, and there’s no magical sentence to say or program to implement that would suddenly see every neighborhood in Richmond vaccinated at the same rate as Windsor Farms. As Cotina Brake, outreach leader at the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts says, one-on-one conversations are critical moving forward—and that’s slow, methodical work.
The RTD’s Jessica Nocera checks back in on the region’s school bus driver situation, and it’s not great! School buses are a critical part of suburban and rural infrastructure because there’s often just not a safe alternative way to get kids to and from school. While the City faces a smaller bus driver shortage than the counties, there are at least other options for some—but not all—city-dweller families.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has written a scathing column on the Mayor’s decision to appoint Lincoln Saunders as the City’s permanent, non-Interim-or-Acting CAO. I’ll just quote a few lines from the piece: “How many people with a similar dearth of experience who are not friends and close associates of the mayor would have the privilege of an audition for this top job? This administration talks a lot about equity and inclusion. But the way this is being handled is the opposite of equity and inclusion. Yes, even relatively young millennials can be seduced by the old-boy network.” Despite this pretty public lambasting (by a Pulitzer Prize Winner), I still think the Mayor has the five votes on Council needed to approve this appointment. I’m not sure when they’ll take this up, but their next meeting will take place on September 13th.
I feel like I must have written about Hamilton Glass’s Mending Walls project in the past, right? If not, it’s pretty rad: “Mending Walls is a public art project that brings together public artists from different cultures and backgrounds to create murals that address where we are now in society and how we can move forward through understanding and collaboration.” Ashley Branch at VPM has a few more details on the project, plus a reminder that you can watch a documentary on Mending Walls on September 16th or listen to an 18-episode podcast about the project and its process. Make sure you take a couple minutes this morning to tap through the walls that are part of this project and read the stories behind them.
I’ve been on a slow journey to replace all of my home’s gas-burning appliances, and this column in the Virginia Mercury sums up why that’s important: HVAC systems in our homes are easier to replace than power plants. If you’ve got a stove, water heater, or furnace on the way out, consider replacing it with an electric version!
Finally, great work teens of Henrico County.
This morning's longread
Invasion of the Robot Umpires
Technology is wild! Sometimes I can’t get over how it just creeps into everywhere and suddenly everyone is like “yeah, robot umpires, what’s the big deal?”
When the robots came, the arguments basically stopped. After the Ducks game, I met DeJesus outside the ballpark. “There were six calls that I disagreed with,” he said, referring to the words that came through his earpiece from the robot. “One pitch was right down the middle. I went to call strike three, and it said, ‘Ball,’ and I went, ‘Ball!’ And I looked at both dugouts.” No one had come out to argue. He continued, “I miss the battles.” In his day job, DeJesus works as a special-education teacher on Staten Island. His commute to Islip can be three hours. The Atlantic League pays him a hundred and sixty dollars a game. His dream is to umpire the College World Series. He trains himself using a virtual-reality headset, and he rewatches footage after every game. He has worked more than six thousand games and called upward of half a million pitches. “When I first heard about A.B.S., I was very angry,” he said.
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