Good morning, RVA! It's 57 °F, and we’ve got another temperate, smoky day ahead of us. Expect highs in the upper 70s, hazy skies, and an Air Quality Alert that lasts through midnight. Yesterday, our Air Quality Index topped out at 179 around lunchtime and stayed in the “unhealthy” zone until around 7:00 PM. Today, Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality forecasts another unhealthy air day with an AQI around 151 (which is the threshold between “unhealthy” and “unhealthy for sensitive groups”). While we’ve got an AQI above 150, the EPA recommends that everyone “choose less strenuous activities (like walking instead of running) so you don't breathe as hard, shorten the amount of time you are active outdoors, and be active outdoors when air quality is better.” Climate change continually reveals strange and horrible impacts that I’d never once thought about ten years ago.
Water cooler
You should read RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras’s email from last night, in which he talks to Kevin Olds, a former assistant principal at Huguenot High School who knew Shaw Smith, one of two people killed at this week’s mass shooting. To quote just a bit of it, “Shawn had a joyous and infectious smile. His sense of humor made him full of life, laughter, and all things fun. He was also a very bright young man who could master any textbook.“ Additionally, “out of an abundance of caution,” Kamras has decided to close all RPS schools today and tomorrow, effectively and abruptly ending the school year. Like yesterday, I just feel sad. Sad for these kids who live in this world where missing out on the last day of school because of gun violence is just a regular part of life. If you or your family need any sort of resources to help process through this moment, you’ll find a good starting list down at the bottom of Kamras’s email.
Charlie Paullin at the Virginia Mercury reports that the State Air Pollution Control Board approved the withdrawal of Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. That the Board voted to backwardly double down on climate change the very same day the Commonwealth’s air was literally unhealthy to breath due to climate-change-fueled air pollution, seems, honestly, a little too on the nose. Sounds like a done deal to me, but the Virginian-Pilot quotes Sen. Hashmi, saying that she thinks the General Assembly has final say over Virginia’s RGGI membership. I guess we now wait and see if the courts get involved to sort things out.
Today, from 6:00–8:00 PM, the Neighborhood Resource Center (1519 Williamsburg Road) will host one of my favorite kinds of meetings: A Combined Sewer Overflow public meeting! Exciting, right?? Stop by to hear more about the $17.39 million, ARPA-funded “Combined Sewer Overflow Interim Plan Project CSO - 004.” Despite its intimidatingly robotic-sounding name, the project has a fairly straightforward goal to install a larger pipe down by Gillies Creek and Stone Brewing to “reduce the number of combined sewer overflow events by an estimated 48 events annually.” That’s a lot fewer events a lot less poop in the river each year (an estimated reduction of 5.1 million gallons of sewer overflow, in fact)! You can learn a bit more and see a diagram of the proposed construction in this PDF.
Via /r/rva, this really neat scratch-off map comparing Richmond in 1876 to Richmond now. If you want to really get into it, reenact urban renewal by following the path of the Downtown Expressway or I-95 to see just how much destruction those highways brought to our city.
This morning's longread
Supreme Risk: An Interactive Guide to Rights the Supreme Court Could Take Away
ProPublica put together an interesting dataset of who on the Supreme Court is trying to take away your rights. The answer, almost always, is Clarence Thomas. Yes, ProPublica does try to balance things out with entries like “who wants to take away your right to carry a hand gun in public,” which, eye roll, but, by in large, it’s Clarence Thomas and his republican-appointed colleagues who wants to strip away rights from Americans.
To get a better sense of which rights may be at risk — in whole or in part — ProPublica scoured judicial opinions, academic articles and public remarks by sitting justices. Some justices, like Clarence Thomas, have had decadeslong careers and lengthy paper trails. By contrast, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest justice, has almost no prior record. We found dozens of rights that at least one sitting justice has questioned. Below, you can explore these rights and the objections levied against them. We include federal legislation that’s been introduced to protect a given right, as well as lawsuits active in lower courts that could become vehicles for the justices to revisit existing rights in the future.
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Picture of the Day
Man with a katana in a crosswalk is Regular Broad Street Stuff.
