Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F, and today looks a little warmer than yesterday and brings with it some absolutely perfect highs in the mid 70s. Rain will likely move in on Saturday, though, so take the next 48 hours and find some time to go enjoy the out-of-doors!
Water cooler
Yesterday, GRTC announced exciting news for bus riders: They’ll now provide free Transit Royale subscriptions for all riders. This means that Richmond joins the list of growing municipalities to have an official relationship with the really wonderful and beautiful Transit app. If you ever need to ride the bus, this is the app to use. It’s useful, fun, and, most of all, much easier to use any other public transit app I’ve put on my phone. I can’t recommend it enough! With the free Transit Royale subscription users get a bunch of fun perks, but mostly I’m excited about how this illustrates GRTC’s commitment to providing a better and more modern experience for transit riders. Download the app, tap around a bit, and start planning your next trip today.
City Council’s Education and Human Services committee meets today at 2:00 PM with a short list of papers to consider but a handful of interesting presentations and discussion items. I can’t find the associated PDFs, but if you tune in at 2:00 PM you’ll hear updates on both “Children’s Funding Project fiscal mapping” and the state and federal early childhood funding cliff. As you probably guessed, these two things are related! I’m especially interested in the former as the Children’s Funding Project is a nonprofit that “helps communities and states expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing.” Certainly sounds like a PDF worth reading (if anyone has a copy, please send it my way). After these two presentations, the Committee will try to make space in their brains for Council’s upcoming legislative agenda, a homeless services update, and then they’ll hear from the RPS School Board.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams reflects on the summer of 2020 and looks at where we stand today, after that moment of racial reckoning. Here’s the depressing gist: “In hindsight, the momentum from those street protests was destined to stall in a nation that historically has lacked the emotional stamina or spiritual resolve to sustain a pursuit of social justice.” The other day, after reading one horrible thing or another, I thought it would be helpful to look through the list of actual gains we have made over the last three years—because I know there have been some! But it’s hard to hold on to those things when, daily, it feels like we’re taking so many steps backwards.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond wanted to figure out the actual average salary—not compensation!—for Casino 2.0 employees. The answer? “A spokesperson for Richmond Grand Resort and Casino, Michael Kelly, wouldn’t say.”
VPM’s Lyndon German has a quick update on the Hanover County School Board, which has become a sort of home court for Governor Youngkin’s extreme policies in schools. At the moment the Board is focused on banning books, of course, but they’re also really interested in where people pee. They’ll consider changes to both policies—library books and bathrooms—at a November 14th meeting, and I assume whatever they propose will pass. It does make me wonder, though, what next thing from their agenda Republicans will attempt to pilot up in Hanover County Schools.
Via RIC Today, the Kickers have put together a Ukrop’s rainbow cookie training top that is beautiful in a grotesque, all-over-print-shirt kind of way. I think I’m really into it (and I’m a size medium, btw).
This morning's longread
The City That Fell Off a Cliff
I could not get enough of these accounts from hundreds of years ago about a city that fell into the sea hundreds of years before that. Half a millennium seems like an eternity for people but is just a vanishingly small moment for a coastline—certainly plenty of time for the push and pull of our planet to completely erase an entire human settlement.
The clifftop ruin made a harrowing image, particularly as a jagged silhouette in the twilight or in the dawn’s metal light. It was much photographed — there was a grim inevitability, but also melancholic beauty, as the cliff-face drew near, and the church slid ever closer to the abyss. So strange to think that the house of God had once been a long way from the cliff-edge, in the westernmost part of Dunwich and shielded from the sight of sailors by a swarm of buildings. As the sea drew uncomfortably close in the mid-eighteenth century it was declared a lost cause. By the Victorian period, it lay totally abandoned and it would be eaten, in tantalising increments, by the waves. The nave was occupied by bats and owls as the waters spumed over the cliff at high tide and gnawed away at its base, precipitating the landslides until only a pitiful shard remained, and, three years later, this too went under — a creeping oblivion so perfectly captured on yellowed postcards with their fancy for vanishing worlds
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Picture of the Day
Fall in Richmond!
