Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and you can expect highs in the 80s with lots of sunshine. Yesterday, I took some time to go get after it in the forest on my bike, and the weather was just so, so perfect—and we have more of the same lined up for this afternoon! I hope you can block off at least a little bit of time today to spend outside enjoying another wonderful October day in Richmond.
Water cooler
After traffic violence killed two students in two separate incidents on VCU’s Monroe Park campus, the University commissioned a pedestrian safety study. That study has now wrapped up and you can read the press release about it or dig into the full, 41-page study. I confess that I pulled up the PDF with a pretty skeptical tap, but, turns out, there are some really great recommendations in there: Banning right turns on red, upgrading crosswalks, adding curb extensions, hardening left turns, and even closing some streets to vehicular traffic. I’m honestly surprised at how hard some of these recommendations go! However, each set of improvements comes with a bunch of implementations steps, most of which involve the City evaluating the recommendation and deciding if it is “justified.” We’ll just have to see what happens if the Department of Public Works dumps a bunch of cold water on some of these (pretty progressive) VCU-backed infrastructure plans. If VCU does manage to raise crosswalks, extend curbs, ban right-on-reds, the City should treat it as a pilot and begin extending the same treatments to its other pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods.
This piece in Richmond BizSense by Jonathan Spiers about VCU’s botched real estate deal with the City is so spicy. Save it for when you’ve got time to text quotes back and forth to your most fun local government group chat.
Eric Kolenich at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the owner of Ellwood Thompson’s has sold the grocery store to Healthier Choices Management Corp, a company out of Florida. Before you gasp too hard about the loss of a locally-run business, “Healthier Choices buys successful businesses and largely leaves them untouched, said Christopher Santi, the president of the publicly traded company. It often purchases stores that were owned by the same person for decades, and it pursues stores that sell local products and offer a high level of customer service.” Time will tell, but the sale definitely marks the end of an era! Remember when the left half of Ellwood Thompson’s was a Blockbuster??
As I move closer and closer to my final, costal-grandma form, I can’t not link to events like the Virginia Museum of History & Culture’s History Meets Horticulture. VMHC has put together tons of plant-related presentations and workshops spread out across the weekend, but you can also just tour the museum and check out several dozen floral arrangements assembled by the Garden Club of Virginia. This is all extremely my jam, as I’ve gotten to the point with my gardening that “Color Theory for Designers & Gardners” is something I already spend a nontrivial amount of time thinking about! If you plan on attending, some of the special programs do require tickets but plenty of stuff is included with your regular museum admission. Karen Newton at Style Weekly has more details if you need further convincing.
This morning's longread
Explore the evolution of beer, from Stone Age sludge to craft brews
The Washington Post put together this nice, quasi-interactive history of beer. I love beer and I love history, and I loved this! Scrolling through the article made me appreciate how far we’ve come since 2012’s “Snowfall,” which invented this whole genre of online storytelling almost 11 years ago.
A waypoint between bread and beer is a kind of spiked porridge that would stretch any modern beer connoisseur’s definition of “chewy.” A team of Stanford researchers found something like that in Israel in 2015 when they came across what may have been a 13,000-year-old beer-making operation in a burial cave near Haifa. It was used by the Natufian people, who were known to harvest and process wild grain. In stone mortars carved into the cave’s bedrock floor, the team found traces of starch consistent with a very thick wheat-and-barley-based alcohol. Some scholars would like more evidence that beer and not bread was being made in that specific cave, because the tools and processes are similar. But it makes sense that the Natufians would’ve been brewers, said Kirk French, who teaches Anthropology of Alcohol at Pennsylvania State University and was not involved in the Stanford study. “They had grain for a long time,” French said. “If they weren’t making beer, it would be different than every other place in the world that has staple crops. If they had grain, they had alcohol.”
If you’d like to suggest a longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
Picture of the Day
You never know what you’re going to find in the forest.
