Good morning, RVA! It's already 74 °F, and today looks just freaking hot with highs in the mid 90s plus Feels Likes around 105 °F. I may just melt into a pile of goo. These excessively hot highs continue as far as the eye / 10-day forecast can see, with maybe a bit of relief arriving midweek. Stay cool, and stay hydrated!
Water cooler
Scott Bass has an opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about VCU’s recent $73 million, gone-south real estate deal. If you’ve been casually following along for the past couple of months, this piece will catch you up and give you a good overview of the entire situation. However, I mostly link to it because it’s a prominent columnist in the region’s most prominent paper sort of calling for VCU President Michael Rao’s resignation. The final sentence of the piece reads, “Richmond is changing, demographics headwinds are coming, and the real estate juggernaut that is Virginia Commonwealth University needs to reevaluate its mission and values—and its leadership.” Intense!
Also in the RTD, Sean Jones reports that Hanover County’s push to ban books in its schools is going just about as well as you’d expect, with the School Board directing librarians to start reviewing books for removal using a tool affiliated with the far-right extremist group Moms for Liberty. Just last week, the School Board added “BookLooks” to the list of tools librarians could use to vet books, despite it not being professionally recognized as a source for such things. While that seemed bad, librarians still had a set of real and serious tools to use to vet materials. However, this week the RTD got a hold of some County documents that state, “educators are expected to use BookLooks...as the first authority when gauging a book's suitability.” Well, that bait-and-switch did not take long at all! From my perspective, Hanover County has decided to function as a laboratory for dystopian futures in Virginia and is running full-tilt in a direction that really freaks me out.
Michael Schwartz at Richmond BizSense reports that the “the sale of a Henrico golf and tennis club to an out-of-state suitor has fallen through.” This is the Lakeside Park Club off Lakeside Avenue, which, and I had no idea, opened as a safe and welcoming Jewish country club back in 1915. Urban(ish) golf courses are one of the worst ways to use our land, and I’d hoped that with this sale off the table, the current owners would start to entertain redeveloping the course into housing. But, alas! Sounds like they’re content to keep running a golf course (with a substantial amount of debt). Let’s check back in five years and see if that’s still true.
RTD triple header! Here’s a whole entire piece about Flingo, the person who chucks hot dogs into the stands at Flying Squirrels games while wearing a flamingo costume. There are some good sentences in here, including “There is a movement in Richmond, Virginia, surrounding this man and this bird.”
Yesssss, finally! Someone wrote about The Great Northside Bamboo Die-Off (that’s actually happening all over town). WTVR’s Sierra Krug reports on the strange and wonderful bamboo lifecycle, which I’ve been forcing everyone in my orbit to listen to me go on about this entire summer. It’s so fascinating! Bamboo flowers very infrequently—like once every 40–80 years. After it flowers, it dies. Even more interesting, is that all the bamboo that originated from the same bamboo plant will die at the same time, no matter where it ended up. This means huge forests of bamboo can up and die simultaneously and is probably why all of the bamboo scattered around the Northside is suddenly turning brown and falling over. Given the long time periods between flowerings, this could be the first time we’ve experienced a bamboo die-off since the Northside even existed! Amazing!
This morning's longread
The country has come apart. Rural America has a cure.
Via John Murden—the godfather of Richmond’s local, independent news scene—this piece in the Washington Post looks at how hyperlocal news is so critical for a functioning and healthy community. We need more of this in Richmond, and we especially need more of it in Henrico and Chesterfield.
The economics are weak, but the desire for community connection is strong. Kim Kleman, head of Report for America, which has placed and subsidized 600 journalists over the past five years, tells me she’s seeing “hyperlocal papers” popping up in cities — essentially transplanting the rural community model. The Rapp News shows the potential. Extraordinary things happen in the newspaper’s humble office in the county seat of Washington, Va., home to the renowned Inn at Little Washington. The newsroom is a converted second-floor bedroom crowded with a wooden dining table and a few laptops. Brack takes photos and designs the paper. Shanahan holds local officials to account. Clatterbuck keeps tabs on birthdays and other local trifles. Along the way, this tiny paper produces some fabulous yarns about rural life.
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
Summer harvest.
