Good morning, RVA! It's 54 °F, and it’s rainy. But! Looks like things should dry out and warm up as the day goes on, with temperatures topping out around 70 °F. Take advantage of it, because tomorrow looks cooler and wetter and a lot more like a cozy-on-the-couch movie night.
Water cooler
Ooo political intrigue! Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury reports that Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Jillian Balow, has resigned. WRIC’s Dean Mirshahi has Balow’s resignation letter. Fascinating stuff. Was Balow pushed out because of the $200 million education budget snafu? Was she not intense enough in supporting the Administration’s attempts to defund public schools? Was she too intense? Is she just tired of it all? Balow doesn’t give a reason for her resignation, so we probably won’t know much until we can contrast her tenure with that of whoever the Governor picks as her replacement.
RVAgreen 2050’s March newsletter is out, and you should take a minute or two to give it a read. Of note, the Department of Environmental Quality wants public comments on the potential repeal of the Carbon Budget Trading Program—aka shortsightedly removing Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. You can and should leave a public comment in support of the Commonwealth staying in this important program! Not sure what to say? Just crib from Mayor Stoney’s comment: “As Mayor of the City of Richmond, we cannot escape the environmental impacts of climate change that are taking shape in cities across the country like mine, that’s why I’m proud of the work that has gone into developing the RVAgreen 2050 plan… However, local governments alone cannot solve the climate crisis. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a common sense, market-based, cost-effective, and critically important program that cuts harmful carbon pollution while delivering a multitude of benefits to communities across Virginia… I urge the Members of the Air Pollution Control Board to continue Virginia’s participation in RGGI.” Make sure you delete the stuff about being mayor of Richmond though...
City Council’s Education and Human Services committee meets this afternoon and has a fun list of discussion topics: “fiscal mapping for shared priorities” from the Office of Children and Families, a review of the construction timeline for both Fox Elementary and the replacement for George Wythe High School, an update on the RPS budget from Superintendent Kamras, and a “Richmond School Board Update” from RPS Board vice chair Cheryl Burke. I would listen to each one of these—and probably will! Tune in today at 2:00 PM, or, fingers crossed, I’ll get this posted up on the Boring Show once I get my act together.
Richmond BizSense’s Jack Jacobs talks to three local groups, each impacted in different ways by the mysterious dissolution of Enrichmond. I’d love to know how other cities solve the problem of small, volunteer groups and “Friends Of” organizations needing administrative infrastructure like bank accounts, donations, and insurance. Is that something the City could provide? Maybe the Community Foundation? As Jacobs reports, having another local nonprofit step into that role after the collapse of Enrichmond doesn’t seem like a very reassuring solution. Also, I kind of can’t believe we still don’t know what happened! Like, tens of thousands of dollars vanished! Seems like someone should figure that out?
From Mike Platania, also at Richmond BizSense, here’s a headline that I couldn’t resist tapping on: “Vegan cheese experiment leads to Fan restaurant’s frozen pizza spinoff.” More vegan food is probably better for all of us overall, so I appreciate the experimentation.
Tonight, at the National, Welcome to Night Vale will finish up its current tour with a live episode of the weird / funny / spooky / lovecraftian podcast. While live music is not my thing (I know, I know), I enjoy a good live podcast—everyone’s sitting down, no one’s bumping into me, and I never have to wonder what to do with my hands. I’m an irregular Welcome to Night Vale listener, but I think if I were to write fiction seriously, it would be the same brand of unserious horror that Night Vale does really well. Sounds fun, and you can get tickets for tonight’s show through the National’s website.
This morning's longread
The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
At least it’s not just me, you know?
Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.
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Picture of the Day
A good alley.
