📖 Good morning, RVA: New-look Council, books!, and e-bike rebates

Good morning, RVA! It’s 28 °F, and this morning looks cold and sunny while this afternoon looks cloudy and a bit warmer, with highs near 50 °F. Overnight temperatures for the rest of the week will hunker down below freezing, so keep that in mind if you’ve got any quick-to-freeze pipes. One of my favorite nerdy-yet-useful things I’ve done is create a Shortcut on my phone that checks the overnight temperatures and, if they drop below 25 °F, creates a reminder to drip our bathroom faucet. You can download it here if you vibe with this sort of automation! And, yes, our shared family reminders list is called “Catrow House of Horrors” for some reason.
 

Water cooler

Get excited, because we have a new-look City Council for the remainder of 2024! Yesterday, Council gathered for their first meeting of the year and swore in 9th District’s Nicole Jones to replace the outgoing Mike Jones (no relation). They also elected 4th District’s Kristen Nye to serve as president and 3rd District’s Anne-Frances Lambert to serve as vice president. I couldn’t find any new committee assignments (yet), so I’m not sure if the current assignments will stand for the remainder of the year, if the new leadership hasn’t had a minute to dig in, or if I just didn’t look hard enough. Don’t get too attached to this City Council lineup, though, because, come November, we elect a whole new set of legislators. I bet we’ll even start seeing people announce their candidacy in just a couple of months, and, I’ll tell you what, I can’t wait!
 

Via VPM, last month the Libby App put together this list of the most borrowed books in 2023. First, as I’ve said a million times, you should definitely get the Libby app and a library card at the three local libraries—Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. They have a membership sharing situation so no matter which locality you live in you can get a card at all three, really expanding the catalog that’s available to you at any given moment. Second, three of these books—A Court of Thorn and Roses, A Court of Mist and Fury, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue—also have the honor of making the list of books banned by Hanover County Public Schools.
 

Wyatt Gordon, writing for the Virginia Mercury, explores the possibility of e-bike rebates coming to the Commonwealth. I think e-bike rebates are a fantastic idea and agree that they’re probably something that the state needs to handle to be really effective. Along those lines, Gordon reports that Del. Josh Thomas will attempt to carry a statewide e-bike voucher bill at this coming General Assembly session. Exciting! Usually these things take a couple years to make their way all the way through the process and onto the governor’s desk, but I’ll definitely keep my eye on this once the legislation exists.
 

Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has a new column up today about that time someone asked Nikki Haley what caused the Civil War and she wouldn’t say “slavery.“ That time, in case you missed it because you had much better things to do, was literally last week—in 2023!—at a town hall in New Hampshire as she continues to test the presidential waters. Tap through to get some good commentary from Williams and a nice Civil War history lesson from local expert Ed Ayers.
 

This morning’s longread

Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong

I knew basically nothing about nasal congestion before reading this article, so I didn’t have any strongly held beliefs shaken to their very cores, but I did learn a whole lot of weird stuff!
 

Nasal congestion, I’ve learned in all this, is far weirder than I ever thought. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is somehow connected to our armpits. The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears. And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing.
 

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Picture of the Day

A gourd offering.