Good morning, RVA! It's 28 °F, which is pretty cold. But, don’t worry, by the time this afternoon rolls around we’ll return to our recent “highs in the mid 50s” standard. Later in the day, we should see a bunch of sun, which should help finish drying everything out. Behold! A decent Thursday!
Water cooler
City Council’s Finance and Economic Development committee meets today, and you can find their full agenda here. This is normally the most boring committee for someone (like me) who has a hard time understanding municipal finance. Today, though, Finance will consider ORD. 2024-039 which would raise the floor of City Council liaison salaries from $47,161 to $70,000, and midpoint from $65,915 to $90,000. This is a big deal! When a smart councilmember gets paired up with a liaison that functions more as a policy advisor than as an admin we start to see Council consider more interesting and progressive legislation (although, to be clear, each role is incredibly important and every counclilmember should have both a policy advisor and an admin). This new salary range would, with any luck, allow for more policy-experienced folks to consider liaisoning—which would be great! I bet there are even people reading this email right now making the hmmm emoji face.
Unrelated, important, and, turns out, still pretty interesting, Sabrina Joy-Hogg, the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Finance and Administration, will give the committee a presentation on the City’s progress with spending down all of that ARPA money. Maybe a good one to stash in the PDF library?
Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury has a General Assembly crossover roundup for you, listing out what lives and what will most likely die in the coming days. If you read one “what the heck is still going on at the GA” piece, make it this one! Also, Moomaw has an interesting take on the weed bills that both chambers passed: “Nevertheless, a recreational marijuana bill could still land on Youngkin’s desk, forcing him to veto it or give in as part of a broader legislative deal with Democratic leaders.”
Do you want to get more involved in advocating for safer streets, more sidewalks, and a better connected network of bike lanes? Then, take note! You have until February 23rd to apply for Bike Walk RVA’s Spring 2024 Academy. Here’s the pitch: “You will get hands-on training, skill-sharing, and team-building to best advocate for funding, plans, and policies for significant development of bikeways, multi-use trails, and sidewalks in our region. Learn what it takes to have active transportation infrastructure built and how to advocate for it.” This is, no joke, probably our region’s best advocacy training, and there’s a long list of infrastructure that only exists due to the hard work put in by the advocates trained through this program. If you’re interested, even the littlest bit, you should apply—there’s a whole lot of projects sitting just over the horizon (I’m looking at you Fall Line Trail) that’ll need the work of many hands to drag them successfully across the finish line.
This morning's longread
Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is thinking itself. I often get busy scrolling back and forth through my todo list, looking for things to check off, taking care of this little thing or that small item, but never really making any progress on the bigger projects I need to tackle. I call this “flipping tabs,” because, when I’m at my worst in these moments, I’ll catch myself just flipping back and forth between open browser tabs never actually doing anything at all. After reading this piece about note taking, I’ve started to give myself permission to just spend “long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more.” It’s really helped.
I caught similar vibes in today’s longread about getting lost in books and resisting the urge to skim, summarize, or bulletpointize in pursuit of some weird productivity / efficiency goal.
Too many entrepreneurs come into the book space and don’t realize that the majority of readers love to get lost in books and to ponder them and process them and to argue with our friends about them. With the rise of year-end reading goals on sites like Goodreads, even those of us who actually like to read can get caught up in the commodification of reading, where productivity must increase year over year. Optimization and efficiency leave very little room for meandering walks with great big books that require deep thought and engagement. And I don’t know about you but that’s what I love about literature the most.
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Picture of the Day
Related to the above longread—and despite years of arguing against paper—I’ve found writing in a small notebook to be really rewarding.
