Good Morning, RVA: Whoa, whoa, we’re halfway there

Let the perfect weather pull you through today and on to tomorrow.

August 13, 2014; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It’s 73 °F, the rain clouds are gone, humidity is down, and today’s temperatures are looking to peak in the mid-80s. It’s another perfect day in RVA!

Water cooler

Henrico County’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the zoning for that part of town’s impending Wegmans. Grocery store fanatics (which is basically all of Richmond) breath a sigh of relief.

The RTD’s Jacob Geiger has a follow-up with some of the food truck vendors who paid to participate in Washington’s training camp. The piece is heavy on qualitatives and light on quantitatives, but overall it sounds like a shift in the practice schedule, among other things, led to poor turnout and low profits.

There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. Alfred Nobel didn’t think mathematics had any practical application and couldn’t improve the lives of humans, so the Nobel Prize in economics is about as close as it gets for mathematicians. Luckily, there’s the Fields Medal which is awarded for outstanding discoveries in mathematics (take that, stupid Nobel!). This year’s recipient is Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to ever win the medal. Mirzakhani is a professor at Stanford and studies bizarre geometry.

Lauren Bacall died last night. Bacall starred in a million films alongside the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Gregory Peck. In 2009 she won the Academy Honorary Award, which they give you if you’ve, basically, spent your entire life being awesome.

Sports!

• Squirrels lost again last night and have won just two out of the last 12 games. They’ll try to turn things around tonight against New Hampshire at 7:05 PM.
• Nats triumphed over the Mets, 7-1. The series continues at 7:10 PM tonight.

This morning’s longread

America Is Not For Black People

In the midst of the ongoing turmoil in Ferguson, this powerful piece is the best I’ve found at laying out and working through a lot of the feelings I’ve had over the past couple of days.

The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he’ll reasonably think that his job isn’t simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men.

Photo by: 1eyephotography

This morning’s Instagram

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August 13, 2014 7:02 AM 0