Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and today you can expect another round of unseasonably warm weather with highs in the mid 60s. Tomorrow, though, cooler weather returns, reminding us that it is, technically, winter. When I peer into the depths of the 10-day forecast I can eventually see temperatures below freezing, so you should take advantage of today’s clear, sunny highs and get out there and enjoy it if you can.
Water cooler
Jahd Khalil at VPM has a tiny interview with Mike Jones, the newly-presidential councilmember from the city’s 9th District. No new news here, but you can catch a glimpse of Jones’s tone and tenor which is a decent-sized shift from outgoing president Councilmember Newbille. This quicky interview also hits on the two things I’m most interested in about the beginning of Jones’s tenure as Council president: How he’ll run the budget process and how he’ll manage all of his local responsibilities while also running for a House of Delegates seat. The former kicks off in March and the latter has already started picking up steam.
VPM has brought back the People’s Agenda to help guide their coverage of the 2023 General Assembly session! Popularized by one of my favorite news thinkers, Jay Rosen, the People’s Agenda seeks to ask regular people what they think is important about an election and then has those answers guide a newsroom’s coverage of that election. Seems obvious, but if you’ve ever read any news during election season, you know there’s a lot of focus on who can win, who is winning, who will win, and the generally exciting-but-useless horse race between candidates (for a recent example see all the doomsaying about this past fall’s Red Wave which never materialized). This year VPM is bringing the People’s Agenda concept to their General Assembly coverage and has just one simple questions for readers: “What do you want to learn about the most during the 2023 Virginia General Assembly session?” I think for me, that’d be public school funding and abortion—with the caveat that I don’t really care about bills specifically designed to generate headlines but have no hope of passing. There’s too much at stake and we’re all too exhausted to waste precious braincycles on people playing legislative games! So go ahead and fill out the form at the bottom of the aforelinked article and help guide this year’s General Assembly coverage. It’ll take you just 90 second and is an easy way to directly participate in The News.
Lyndon German at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has some before-and-after maps of the changes coming to GRTC’s bus routes in January. I still think it’s a bad idea to break the #1 into two parts—a northern half and a southern half—and force a stopover at the transfer plaza. Cross-town, one-seat rides were part of the plan when the bus system was redesign several years ago, and this change is counter to that plan. Also as part of the January changes, the #77 and #78 will see their frequency drop from every 45-minutes to hourly. It certainly feels like our bus system has suffered a slow series of small cuts over the last handful of years, but it’s hard for my brain to keep track of it all. I need someone to do a line-by-line comparison of the bus service we had in 2019 to what we’ve got now. I think it’d help when advocating for more funding and resources from our local, regional, and state governments.
Remember when a storm rolled through and high winds blew the roof off of an apartment building on Arthur Ashe Boulevard? That building has sat roofless since then! Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports that the entire building just sold for $1.25 million, and the new owner hopes to have repairs and renovations done by March. Wild.
Via /r/rva a picture of a car in Byrd Park lake. In what’s gotta be the worst luck of all time, apparently someone was changing their tire, forget to set the parking break, and the car rolled down the hill into the lake. Oof.
This morning's longread
Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album
Here’s a long and charming piece about 19th Century seaweed collections. Also: Who knew The Public Domain Review was a thing? I love it!
Naturalists of the nineteenth century took a different angle. Although they understood that seaweed “conferred a positive benefit on the atmosphere”, its appeal was precisely its lack of utility. The same word that described seaweed on shore — “rejectamenta” — also described anything more generally considered detritus. Seaweed seemed to be a weird, surplus embellishment that existed for no particular purpose except to express the wonders of the deep ocean. When the preeminent algae scholar William H. Harvey decided at age fifteen to devote his life to algology, it was the same as if he’d pledged allegiance to profitless esotericism. He wrote his former teacher that he intended “to study my favourite and useless class, Cryptogamia. I think I hear thee say, Tut-tut! But no matter. To be useless, various, and abstruse, is a sufficient recommendation of a science to make it pleasing to me.”4 No other field of study was so delightfully feckless.
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Picture of the Day
Silent Hill? Haunted TB hospital? Pine Camp during that really foggy morning last week?
