Good morning, RVA! It's 64 °F, and, after the rain moves through this morning, I think we could have a pretty cool day on our hands. Expect highs right around 70 °F today and a really wonderful weekend.
Water cooler
Booster update! Yesterday's meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices didn't yield much in terms of who's eligible for a booster when, but they do have another meeting on the books today at 12:00 PM. You can, of course, stream that meeting and really spice up your afternoon. While the CDC advisory group toiled away, the FDA proper announced that they'd authorized Pfizer boosters for folks older than 65, are at high risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19, or are at high risk due to frequent exposure at their jobs—all six months after their second dose. The New York Times has the details. This is a big, loosely defined group of humans that, while not the entire general public, certainly is a big chunk of it. I have no idea what happens if the FDA and CDC disagree on who should get boosters, and that certainly wouldn't help the work going on to addressing hesitancy among those who are completely unvaccinated. Fingers crossed that everyone will end up on the same page at the end of the day after ACIP's meeting. What a rollercoaster!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Ali Rockett attended yesterday's Marcus Alert community forum and reports the program should go into effect this coming December. Lots of good details in this piece, like: "Richmond’s stakeholders have determined four levels of response: routine, moderate, urgent and emergent. Only the third and fourth levels still would require police response, according to Wednesday’s presentation." You can learn more over on the City's Marcus Alert page and attend a second community forum on Saturday, September 25th at 1:00 PM.
Patrick Larsen at VPM made it down to Brown's Island for the unveiling of the Emancipation and Freedom Monument. Tap through to see pictures of the towering statues, and read a few quotes from some local electeds, like Sen. McClellan, who said, "When you come to this statue and you see the whip marks on the man’s back, but you see the baby in the woman’s arms, I mean it really does represent hope and triumph over unspeakable pain and terror and trauma."
More new apartments popping up in and around Scott's Addition, reports Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense: "Dubbed in plans as 'Novel Scott’s Addition,' the new 83,000-square-foot building would add 272 apartments across from The Diamond." That's the property on the west side of Arthur Ashe Boulevard, sitting juuuuuust north of the train tracks. This is not the first or last we'll see of big apartment buildings creeping outside of what we consider Scott's Addition proper and into the larger Diamond District. And more residential units means more humans, which means more need for human-scale infrastructure like separated paths, bike lanes, sidewalks, lighting, shade, seating, that sort of stuff. This proposed development in particular really underscores the need for a pedestrian bridge over the train tracks—can we ARPA that and just check it off the list?
I don't know if you want to read it, but the University of Mary Washington released a new statewide gubernatorial poll that shows a really tight race, with either candidate in the lead depending on how you slice the data (which you can look at in detail here). I just got my mail-in ballot a couple days ago and will make it a priority to set aside time to fill it out this weekend. No fooling around with too-close-to-call poll results! If you still need to register to vote, you can and should do so over on the Department of Elections website today.
This morning's longread
Cracking the Case of London’s Elusive, Acrobatic Rare-Book Thieves
A heist story! This one is about rare, old books which is more of a bummer than heisting something no one really cares about like all of the concession money at a NASCAR race.
Given their unique historical significance and the fact that many contained handwritten notes by past owners, most were irreplaceable. Scotland Yard’s Ward was stunned. He couldn’t recall a burglary like this anywhere. The thieves, as if undertaking a special-ops raid, had climbed up the sheer face of the building. From there, they scaled its pitched metal roof on a cold, wet night, cut open a fiberglass skylight, and descended inside—without tripping alarms or getting picked up by cameras. “Dangerous work,” he says. “This is not something ordinary burglars try to accomplish.”
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