Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and today, with its highs in the mid 50s, is probably the warmest day we’ve got for an entire week. You can expect dry skies for as far as the extended forecast stretches, so outside plans are definitely an option if you put on a couple layers!
Water cooler
PlanRVA, our regional transportation planning group, has launched a survey to gauge folks’ interest in expanding the Pulse west past Willow Lawn. Serving the rest of Broad Street, all the way out to whatever we call just past Short Pump, is clearly the Pulse’s manifest destiny, but it won’t be cheap to expand frequent service that far (and through some of the most congested parts of the region). However! We now have a regional funding mechanism in the Central Virginia Transportation Authority, and these sorts of region-level studies are pretty important to, fingers crossed, help convince the CVTA to eventually chip in funding for expansions like this. Responses are due December 15th, but just take eight minutes this morning and fill it out. Do it! It’s important!
Speaking of! Join RVA Rapid Transit tonight at Common House (303 W. Broad Street) for the premier of Richmond by Bus, a short film created in partnership with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network to show folks “what it’s like for everyday bus riders using public transportation in the Richmond Region.” You can get your ticket for free over on the Eventbrite; watch the film at 6:00, 6:30, or 7:00; meanwhile grabbing a drink or two with some of the region’s biggest transit fans. As we all know, talking public transportation with like-minded folks is an excellent way to spend an evening (and how I spend many of my own evenings!).
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has an important and appropriately dry update to the City’s permitting process. After years of serving as an easy punching bag for media, developers, and even councilmembers, the City’s permitting office has reduced turnaround times from 45 days to an average of five. That’s incredible—and drama-free! You can find a PDF or the office’s recent presentation to Council here, and I encourage you to check out page 10 for a striking graph of how they’ve absolutely dismantled their backlog over the past year.
Mary Scott Hardaway at Style Weekly has a really lovely interview with Kendra Feather and John Murden about Feather’s long-lasting, extremely charming restaurant empire. Feather opened Ipanema—the bar of my youth—allllll the way back in 1998, and the two of them have seen so many changes along Grace Street, specifically, but also all across Richmond. In fact, the bones of this very email newsletter were raised and fitted together in a booth at Ipanema long ago in a time before. Anyway, I really appreciate some of the insights Murden has about how social media impacts their businesses, employees, and their ability to compete in a absolutely packed Richmond restaurant scene.
Axios Richmond’s Ned Oliver reports that just a third of the gubernatorial candidates Governor Youngkin campaigned for actually won their elections. Oliver says, “that trademark vest might not be as valuable as Gov. Youngkin thought,” and Virginia’s Senate Minority Leader Tommy Norment (a republican) hopes the governor will instead “intensify his focus on the commonwealth’s issues.” Now that Trump has officially announced his intention to run for president a third time, it’ll be fascinating/terrible to watch how Youngkin responds.
Early this morning NASA’s Artemis I mission successfully launched on an absolutely massive rocket, carrying an unmanned Orion spacecraft to the moon. Check out this mind bending video of THE PLANET EARTH receding into the distance as seen from Orion. The universe is big, and it gives me the shivers!
This morning's longread
Twitter Is Our Future
More thoughts on the fall/evolution of Twitter, these from longtime journalist James Fallows. I agree with Fallows, that whatever it is we’re watching play out at Twitter is just a sped-up version of what will happen across the media landscape. It’s complicated, and “just get your news from Mastodon” is definitely not going to be the complete, final answer.
This is Elon Musk’s past week at Twitter. It is a time-lapse video of changes in the media, compressing into a few days changes that have been underway for years. The changes are of course technological and financial in origin. But the results—on TV, in magazines, in national news organizations, most dramatically in local publications—boil down to the fact that media communities, habits, and habitats are disappearing. The main variable is the speed. When communities or habitats of any sort decline or are destroyed, there is usually no easy alternative for those who have been displaced. People who might have preferred to stay have to figure out somewhere else to go. That’s happening suddenly with Twitter. It has been happening for a while with other parts of the news establishment that, as I argued recently, are less and less matched to the realities of our times.
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Picture of the Day
The last leaf left on my redbud.
