Good morning, RVA! It's 37 °F, but today's weather looks stunning. Expect clear skies and highs in the 70s. Get out there and enjoy it because rain moves in at some point over the next two days.
Water cooler
Here's this week's graph of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19 across Virginia. You'll notice the hospitalizations graph is more colorful (and more useful) due to a reorganizing of VDH's COVID-19 dashboard. One of the other changes made during that reorganization means you can no longer pull a graph of hospitalizations by locality, but, according to the press release, you can get at the same data over on Virginia's open data portal. After poking around for 30 seconds and failing to build the chart I wanted, I bailed. I'll do better next week!
City Council's Governmental Operations committee meets today at 4:00 PM, and the City Clerk's office will give a really fascinating presentation on the state of boards, commissions, and similar entities. We've got 54 of these groups, 50 are active, and 78 seats remain open (a full 15%!). Scroll through the aforelinked PDF for some great charts about which of Council's committees has the most boards reporting to it (Land Use, Housing and Transportation), the length of terms (typically three years), and which Council districts have the most members (the 8th and 9th Districts each have about a third of the total number of members when compared to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Districts). Pages 12–15 list the Clerks considerations for cleaning up our whole Boards & Commissions process—including addressing barriers that impact diversity in board membership. I frequently write about how folks should apply and participate in one of these things because it's an easy way to get directly involved in the workings of City government, so I'd love to see any tweaks that make the process easier. Tune in today if you want to hear the conversation! P.S. Today is the last day to apply for one of those 78 vacant seats until the next round of applications opens up.
Whoa, check this out: GRTC has partnered with RVA Rapid Transit to launch an Adopt-A-Stop program. The requirements are exceedingly chill—mostly picking up trash and keeping things tidy—and it sounds like a perfect activity for a family, group of transit-oriented pals, or a more progressive civic association. RVA Rapid Transit has a list of nine stops that need adopting, and I'm fairly confident that the readership of this newsletter can have the vast majority of these adopted before the end of the week. Let's make this happen, OK?
Mike Platania has this really interesting report in Richmond BizSense about Mosaic Catering + Events bailing on converting 3013 Cutshaw Avenue into an event space. First, you should tap through and read to get a sense for how hot the urban real estate market is at the moment. Second, the area around the Scott's Addition Pulse Station and the fun new triangle park is going to be a totally different and probably really awesome mini-neighborhood in the next couple of years.
Mel Leonor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the close-to-final reporting on the Governor's attempts to defund public schools through a proliferation of privately-run charter schools. Basically: "The governor’s only remaining bill to usher in more privately run public schools would expand the ability of colleges and universities to open and operate 'lab schools,' using public dollars to foster innovation in education." Democrats in the Senate are willing to entertain lab schools but unwilling to see any existing public school dollars go towards their funding. Seems like they're pretty clear about that and unwilling to compromise (at least on that point).
This morning's longread
Our Brains Want the Pandemic's Story to Be Something It Isn’t
I liked this idea of how humans feel actual anxiety when reality refuses to conform to satisfying narratives. It certain applies to the pandemic where the antagonist is virus that doesn't care about its redemption arc, but I bet it applies to all kinds of other things, too—like when people do bad things for extremely unsatisfying, boring reasons like greed or stupidity.
When you want reality to match a story line you’re accustomed to, but reality doesn’t comply, that’s stressful. McAdams told me that people, and perhaps Americans especially, have a strong desire for, even an expectation of, “redemptive” narratives—stories that go from bad to good. In sermons, commencement speeches, and national myths, people constantly hear tales of triumphing over adversity, but the pandemic’s story has withheld that positive resolution and refused to end, let alone end well. This narrative rupture helps explain why Delta’s emergence particularly stung—it punctured the happy ending that people have come to expect and that seemed for a moment to be within our grasp.
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