Good morning, RVA! It's 62 °F, and today looks a lot like the day before it and the day before that: Cloudy with highs in the 70s. However, things start to warm up over the weekend, and by the time Sunday rolls around we should, once again, see the sun in the sky and feel temperatures up near 80 °F. Next week looks like a great week of weather.
Water cooler
I just linked to a bus survey earlier this week, but doesn’t it feel like we’ve been a little light on the transportation surveys lately? Certainly does to me, and this new survey from the State Trails Office comes at just the right time to fill that survey-shaped hole in my heart. They’d like your feedback on multi-use paths—like the Capital Trail and forthcoming Fall Line Trail—and what your priorities would be should we build a bunch of new trails. For me it’s always: More trails to more places with more safe connections to and from those trails.
The Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation’s Trauma Response Fund supports RPS students, families, and staff after they experience a horrible, traumatic event. Over the past three months, the Fund has “supported school communities impacted by neighborhood or household violence, including providing resources for grief and bereavement; provided direct financial assistance for families facing hardships due to fires and other crises; and funded essential counseling services for RPS employees.” It’s a really critical resource, and you can donate online this morning.
Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond, deep in his element, writes about a recent trip to the State Fair of Virginia. He saw all the great fair standbys, including big gourds, creaky rides, and fried foods. As far as the food goes, “vendors seemed to have mostly dropped the ridiculous menu items of past years (no deep-fried bacon Kool-Aid pizza here). But you can still get a little weird.” Thank goodness for that. The state fair runs through October 1st, and you can buy tickets over on the website.
Via /r/rva, a good thread on local spots to go camping for a night or two. No need to head all the way out to the mountains to find a nice spot to pitch a tent and drink some beers while sitting quietly around a fire—lots of places to do that right in town!
Got a bunch of weird old electronics, cables, oil-based paints, and pesticides laying around? Take them to the City’s e-cycle day this coming Saturday, September 30th at the northeast corner of Robin Hood Road and Arthur Ashe Boulevard from 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM. I know I’ve got an entire section of my basement dedicated to “things I don’t know how to safely throw away and, I swear, I’ll get rid of that pile someday.” If that sounds familiar, tomorrow’s event is just for you! Plus, in addition to helping you clean out your basement, they’ll even shred up to five boxes of documents.
This morning's longread
The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism
Ezra Klein writes for the New York Times about “everything-bagel liberalism,” when liberals try to cram too much objectively good stuff into a project that it becomes so unwieldy and massive that it creaks to a halt. As his examples, he uses affordable housing in San Francisco and Biden’s plan to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States—both huge, complex problems that are made even more challenging by the addition of a wobbly stack of great things: union job, small business requirements, Made-in-American decrees, green energy commitments, and on and on and on. It reminds me of this Cory Doctorow piece from a while back in which he writes “But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn't an administration, it's a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition. This isn't just bad for policy, it's bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger.”
I have no idea what you do about this, but I do think it’s really fascinating to think about.
But sometimes it tries to accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all. I’ve come to think of this as the problem of everything-bagel liberalism. Everything bagels are, of course, the best bagels. But that is because they add just enough to the bagel and no more. Add too much — as memorably imagined in the Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — and it becomes a black hole from which nothing, least of all government’s ability to solve hard problems, can escape. And one problem liberals are facing at every level where they govern is that they often add too much. They do so with good intentions and then lament their poor results. (Conservatives, I should say, are not immune from piling on procedure and stricture, but they often do so in a purposeful attempt to make government work poorly, and so failure and inefficiency become a kind of success.)
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Picture of the Day
You can eat these! I did not, but, like, you could.
