Good morning, RVA! It's 40 °F, and that’s chilly! Today you can expect classic late-October highs in the mid 60s, but, looking at the extended forecast, I see a string of days with temperatures in the 80s later this week. While that’s definitely warmer than the average for this time of year, it does look pretty perfect. I’m choosing to not think too hard about what that means and to, instead, get excited for a week of great weather.
Water cooler
Years ago, back when Outbreak was just a 1995 film starring Dustin Hoffman and not a way of life, Richmond Public Schools launched their Dreams4RPS strategic planning process. It was an incredibly impressive, deep, and involved process that ranks for me (along with Richmond 300) as one of the best public engagement processes we’ve seen in Richmond. Not only was the process great, but the School District actually uses the plan created by all that hard work. The RPS administration regularly presents updates on Dreams4RPS at School Board meetings, which, speaking as a person who enjoys a lot of plans and planing processes, is certainly not always the case. Now, five years later, RPS has kicked off the sequel, Dreams4RPS: Let’s Keep Dreaming. I’m sure Dreams4RPS:LKD will pop back up in the newsletter frequently, but, to get started, fill out the very open-ended feedback survey and put one of these district meetings (open to families, staff, students, and community members) on your calendar.
Axios Richmond’s Ned Oliver reports that I am a full 0.01% of the total number of people who have early voted in the upcoming election. If that seems like a lot, it should, because just 5,242 folks have cast an early ballot. It’s early still, but Oliver also points out that the Casino 2.0 folks have spent over $8 million to turn people out to the polls (plus bought them rides and BBQ!), and the dollar-per-vote at this point looks pretty grim.
Patrick Larsen at VPM has an update on the City’s composting program: Since the program launched, it’s kept almost 100 tons of trash out of landfills! Seems great, and it sounds like the City has started to learn more about the wheres, whens, and hows of making a curbside composting program successful. Check out the City’s website to find the closest purple composting bin to you, and make sure you read through the list of what belongs in the bin and what definitely does not.
Richmond BizSense’s Mike Platania reports that Fan dwellers are about to get two new Mexican places on Robinson Street, Juan More Taco and Nuevo Mexico Restaurant #2. Platania’s got a bunch of details about the former—other than it’s excellent name—including their plans to serve Honduran corn cakes (which sound great) and to stay open for the late-night bar crowd (which sounds smart).
P.S. Don’t forget that ArborDayRVA, Richmond’s biggest and best celebration of trees, runs through the week and into this weekend. Check out the giant list of events (and many, many tree giveaways!) over on the Reforest Richmond website.
This morning's longread
Ozempic Can’t Fix What Our Culture Has Broken
Tressie McMillian Cottom writes about how access to the expensive diabetes/diet drug Ozempic will continue to exacerbate inequities in health. She also links to Maintenance Phase, which, while I haven’t yet listened to this specific episode, is my constant go-to source for explaining our Country’s broken health and wellness culture. As always, great, thoughtful stuff.
That many people don’t even question that eliminating fat people is an objectively good idea is why it is such a powerful idea. Thinness is a way to perform moral discipline, even if one pursues it through morally ambiguous means. Subconsciously, consciously, politically, economically and culturally, obesity signals moral laxity. Any decent cleric will tell you that there is no price too high for salvation, so an entire class of people — the roughly three in four adult Americans who are overweight — is a target for profit-seeking. Medical weight loss interventions have, over the years, led to heart damage, strokes, nerve damage, psychosis and death. But under this moral code, it’s the social policies that promote, subsidize and profit from obesity that are cleansed of their extractive sins. It’s as if fat bodies, by housing slovenly people, do not deserve the protections of good regulations and healthy communities.
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Picture of the Day
Planting pansies and this guy got after me.
