Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and today looks hot, humid, with a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon. Should sound pretty familiar. You can continue to expect highs in the 90s for the next couple of days—maxing out on Thursday—and then maybe we'll get a bit of relief over the weekend. Yes, it's Tuesday and I'm already looking forward to the weekend!
Water cooler
You should read RVAgreen 2050's August newsletter—I enjoyed it, including this quick intro-to-the-cause video. RVAgreen always does digital engagement in really clever ways, giving folks easy, straightforward paths to participate even if they only have a couple of minutes to spare. This month, that engagement goes meta, and they've got a quick, four-minute Community Advocacy Questionnaire that you should fill out. This survey will help RVAgreen "identify and form networks of interested advocates to support Richmond's equitable climate actions and resilience work," and lets you raise your hand to lead, implement, promote, advocate, or stay informed about Richmond's climate efforts across a variety of topics. Go fill it out! Even if all you can commit to is staying informed, it's the literal least you can do as you stay inside trying to avoid today's dangerous heat and humidity.
Jessica Nocera at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on teacher vacancies at Richmond Public Schools. It sounds like while the new financial hiring incentives RPS launched a couple weeks ago are starting to pay off, a bunch of schools still have a bunch of vacancies. Check out this PDF the Superintendent presented at last night’s board meeting and scroll through the list of vacancies at each school on July 10th as compared to July 29th. Progress for sure, but still a ways to go.
Job alert! Bike Walk RVA is hiring a Community Engagement Coordinator to "identify, recruit, and develop members of the community into effective advocates for biking and walking, and then work on a daily basis with these 'Champions' to build support for bicycle and pedestrian friendly policies, plans, and projects." Surely that sounds like a perfect job for someone that reads this email! Give it a think, share the job posting around with your pals, and lets help find a great candidate for this role. You or one of your very bike-forward friends has until August 15th to apply.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond reports on Senator Tim Kaine, “famously a Northside person,” leaving the Northside for a river-adjacent Downtown condo. I can't handle how charming the Senator and Anne Holton are—taking walks around Belle Isle, going canoeing, swimming in the river?? Come on!
Via /r/rva: "What’s the best outdoor location to toss a slinky down the stairs?" Another way to put this question would be "Where are your favorite public stairs in Richmond?" I absolutely love public stairs, and we have a few great ones in the City. I think my vote for some good outdoors slinkying would be 21st and E. Franklin, the abandoned fountain in Kanawha Plaza, or the urban-decay stairs hidden off the southbound side of the Belvidere-Brook Road interchange. Where are your favorite public stairs? Everyone has favorite public stairs, right?
This morning's longread
Living Through India’s Next-Level Heat Wave
It's hard not to think about extreme heat lately. Read this piece in the New Yorker about how India is (trying to) deal with the real and immediate impacts of climate change. It's pretty scary stuff—and not just stuff that impacts some far away land, either. The Virginia Department of Health tracks emergency room and urgent care visits for heat-related illnesses, and you can easily see the summer's hot weather represented on those graphs. This is why I'm always going on and on about staying safe on hot days up in the first paragraph of this newsletter!
The human body is an exquisitely effective temperature-regulation machine. As your core temperature rises, neurons in your brain’s hypothalamus tell your peripheral blood vessels to dilate; this increases blood flow near the skin, where heat can dissipate through sweat. But the system struggles to keep up when temperature and humidity become extreme. Initially, heat increases the body’s metabolic rate: cells consume more oxygen, your heart rate rises, and your breathing grows rapid. As internal heat mounts, enzymes cease to function and proteins become misshapen. An overheated person might experience dizziness, confusion, inflammation, nausea, seizures, or coma. In the worst cases, the body desperately shunts blood to the extremities in an effort to release heat, in the process starving internal organs of oxygen and causing damage to the gut, liver, nerves, and blood vessels. This is heatstroke; up to two-thirds of cases are fatal.
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
