Good morning, RVA! It's 70 °F, and we’ve made it through the heatwave! Today you can expect highs in the upper 80s, mostly sunshine, and maybe a few clouds here and there to cool things off even further. For me, the worst part of last week’s unbearable weather was the hot wind? I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced full on wind that didn’t provide even the smallest amount of relief but instead felt like a giant standing too close and mouth-breathing on me. I could do without it in the future!
Water cooler
Over the weekend, Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams put together this column on the City’s proposed fire training facility at the Hickory Hill Community Center. Snatching away part of the land that makes up a community center and replacing it with a stack of cargo containers that will literally be lit on fire over and over and over again has always seemed counter to a handful of Richmond’s long-term strategic PDFs. It’s not just me saying that either. First the City’s Urban Design Committee and Planning Commission voted against the facility (only to be overruled by City Council), and now MPW weighs in, saying “In a nonsensical perversion of public policy, the city is permitting a burn tower at this community center...For a half-dozen occasions a year, children and adults in this environmentally fragile area of South Richmond will be exposed to noxious fumes in a place of recreation and repose.” Not great. With Council’s approval in hand, the City seems unwilling to reconsider the location, leaving residents to appeal to state legislators and hope for a historic designation. If you’d like to advocate for the preservation of this space, I think you could email Sen. Hashmi in support of her work with creating a new historic designation, and, of course, you could also let the Mayor know you’d like his administration to find a better location for the fire training facility.
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports on Sauer’s plans for the next phase of all that land they own on Broad Street surrounding the Whole Foods. Check it out: “In addition to buildings with residential, retail, office, hotel and other uses, Sauer is also planning to build parks, pedestrian walkways and public green spaces on the land, much of which is currently either industrial or undeveloped.” This is a TON of land—like, more than a half dozen city blocks—and, if done right, a new neighborhood could really connect everything that’s going on up by Hardywood, the proposed Diamond District project, and the Fan proper. But, because I’m me, I really want to see the proposed transportation plan that links all of these new and growing neighborhoods into our existing transportation systems.
This past Friday, Politico reported that Rep. Abigail Spanberger has “told multiple people she will run for governor in 2025.” Obviously we’ve got exceedingly important elections ahead of us this November, so it seems like a big distraction to look ahead two full years. But! I will do exactly that, because a primary contest between Rep. Spanberger and Mayor Stoney (and others) sounds really interesting, and I don’t have a clear sense at all of who would win a statewide contest like that.
This has nothing to do with the Richmond region, but I found it fascinating: James City County voted to split its schools from the City of Williamsburg and create two separate school districts. Apparently, Williamsburg had kicked off a study on creating its own independent school system and that made James City County nervous, so the latter just went ahead and voted to split. They’ve both now got a little less than three years to figure out what this all means—including buying land and building new school facilities! Sounds incredibly stressful and a process for which you’d want deep community buy-in, like, maybe three years set aside for just the community engagement part of things alone.
This morning's longread
The internet is for 12-year-olds
I’ve been thinking about this since I read it a couple weeks ago. This footnote in particular seems like one of the truest things ever written about YouTube: “This is why the only truly adult content on YouTube is, like, videos of Canadian plumbers showing you how to re-ignite the pilot light on your boiler--stuff that no 12-year-old would ever be interested in watching, and so is therefore never pressured to increase its appeal to 12-year-olds.”
One thesis of the Read Max newsletter is that a huge portion-- much more than you might imagine--of content produced on the internet’s big social platforms is consumed by 12-year-olds. I like to cling to this thesis when I encounter something particularly strange and alarming on YouTube or TikTok: If I can remind myself that a video was likely made to appeal to people much younger than me, with less-developed skills for identifying obvious personality disorders, it helps me move past the content and sleep soundly at night. But the consequences of this fact for content creators like Ballinger and MrBeast are pretty obvious: Because the audience online so wildly over-samples 12-year-olds relative to the population, and because all social platforms work like highly competitive marketplaces, you are constantly being disciplined into creating content that is essentially, though not explicitly, for 12-year-olds.
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Picture of the Day
Multimodal! Sort of!
