🐍 Good morning, RVA: School!, bike share!, snakes!

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F, and today, unlike this past weekend’s absolutely beautiful Saturday, looks hot and cloudy. Expect highs in the mid 90s and a lot of very good reasons to just stay inside. Looking ahead, the rest of the week has a bunch of heat in store for us with maybe some cooler temperatures next week. August is a month of enduring!
 

Water cooler

Students! Welcome back! Today marks the first day of the 2023–2024 school year for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield public schools. Good luck to everyone headed back in to school this morning—kids, teachers, staff, administration, everyone. As for the rest of us carrying on about our regular business—especially if you’re driving—keep an eye out for children making their way to school as you move through the region. I know summer is great for all sorts of reasons, but I absolutely love the city’s awakening that’s marked by the return of fall.
 

Big news: Richmond’s Department of Public Works announced that the RVA BikeShare Program will return to action starting TODAY. To make up for the system’s sudden shut down earlier this year, “the city is providing all registered BikeShare users free rides through December 31, 2023.” That’s pretty awesome and way more than the originally planned 30 days of free rides. According to the release, DPW will also celebrate today’s return to service by opening a brand new station at the Dominion Energy Center. At 6th and Grace, this new station will fill a sizeable hole in RVA BikeShare’s coverage map, which, in my mind, is exactly the right way to expand. Up next: Adding, like, six new stations to The Fan please!
 

What ho! Planning Commission shakes City Hall from its August slumber with the first City Council-related public meeting after their summer vacation. You can find the entire agenda here, which is mostly full of Special Use Permits, but, of note, the Commission will consider ORD. 2023–235, the Airbnb ordinance. Kevin Vonck, the Director of Planning and Development Review, has put together a nice presentation explaining the tweaks they’d like to make to the City’s current Airbnb regulations and why those tweaks are important. I anticipate this passing and heading over to full Council in September.
 

Speaking of Council, Tyler O’Connell has done us all a great public service and put the last couple of months of City Council meetings together as a podcast. Two things: 1) I’d love to get committee meetings added to this feed, and 2) I hope Tyler has figured out how to automate this process in a way that I’ve never managed with The Boring Show, my own attempt at this project. Turns out, it’s a lot of work to scrape and pull audio from these meetings by hand! Subscribe today, listen at 2x, and learn more about how the City works—all while you commute, pull weeds, or fold laundry.
 

The award for this summer’s most Orwellian headline and photograph combination definitely goes to VPM’s Jahd Khalil and Shaban Athuman for this piece: “Richmond is planning major upgrades to its surveillance network.” Really, just incredible work on that photo.
 

Via /r/rva: The Eatery, a Richmond classic, will move down the street (and across Arthur Ashe Boulevard) to the old Cary Street Cafe location. I agree with one of the commenters: This is continued evidence of Carytown’s eastward expansion. With just a few more businesses and a couple pieces of infrastructure stretching out in that direction, I think you could have a really nice unified corridor all the way from Thompson to Robinson.
 

Also via /r/rva, a video taken down by the river of a snake carrying a fish in its mouth while it just slithers about its business. I…don’t know how to feel about this.
 

This morning’s longread

Culture Study Meets Bama RushTok

Anne Helen Petersen had a lot of really smart and interesting thoughts about Bama RushTok in her Sunday email that I think y’all will enjoy. Be warned! She links to an Instagram Highlight with at least an hour of RushTok content she’s collected over this year’s rush season. Tap at your own risk if you have actual stuff to do this morning.
 

Of course, these students could go to the University of Oregon, or USC, or Ohio State. But they want a specific kind of big college experience — and Bama is the apotheosis. Big football, of course, but also one where sororities and fraternities are still cool (not “problematic”) and where they can engage in a sort of white Southern cosplay, complete with accent, politics, and remove from the pressures of progressivism that have come to structure urban and suburban norms in many of the places where these kids grew up. (This posture is of course deeply annoying to actual Southerners, whose lived reality is much more complex than the one mapped onto them by outsiders, but it’s no different than what’s happening as out-of-staters become the dominant population in Montana or Texas. At some point, the hackneyed idea of the identity eclipses the identity itself.) The promise of Bama — at least to outsiders — is an opportunity to “make college great again.”
 

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Picture of the Day

Got a little TOO off road.