🕵️‍♀️ Good morning, RVA: Stolen art, frustrating comments, and holiday pop-ups

Good morning, RVA! It’s 39 °F, and we’ve got a little bit of cold rain moving through the region this morning. Give it a minute, and, while the clouds will mostly likely stick around for the entire day, things should dry out pretty soon. Other than that, expect highs in the mid 40s and for me to wear a pair of boots. I’ve still got my eye on the weekend, though, when temperatures will find their way into the 60s!
 

Water cooler

Yesterday, the VMFA announced they’d repatriated “44 works of ancient art following an investigation by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security into the global trafficking of looted or stolen antiquities.” Now this is definitely a press release worth reading! Tap through to learn a bunch of fascinating things like: One item, a bronze Etruscan warrior, was “stolen from Room VIII of the Museo Civico Archeologico (Archaeological Museum) in Bologna, Italy, in 1963” and “VMFA met with Col. Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office…[who] presented the museum with irrefutable evidence that 44 of the 61 works under investigation were stolen or looted and thus warranted repatriation to their countries of origin: Italy, Egypt or Türkiye.” Anne Helen Petersen interviewed Bogdanos last year, and it’s a longread that I’m still thinking about—also worth reading if you have not already!
 

I’m not smart enough to know how the recently implemented changes to Virginia’s statewide transportation project funding formula (SMART SCALE) will impact the Richmond region. I do, however, know that we’ve got a huge problem when Governor Youngkin’s Secretary of Transportation says “The [road] deaths that are happening in Virginia are not tied to engineering, they’re tied to behavior.” Sorry, Secretary Miller, streets designed—engineered, if you will—exclusively for the efficient and fast movement of vehicles are unsafe and deadly. We know this a billion times over (here’s just one recent study), and its frustrating to see the commonwealth’s top transportation guy shrug his shoulders and blame the users of a system that’s designed (engineered) to literally deprioritize their safety. Bah! It’s going to take a decade to walk back all of the changes this administration and its appointees have made to the practical workings of government. Margaret Barthel, from DCist, has more details on the changes to SMART SCALE, if you want to dig in.
 

Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on Village of Faith Ministries’s plans to redevelop one of their properties—the old Genito Cinema 9 complex—into 192 apartments and 40 townhomes. I found a couple interesting notes worth mentioning in this piece. First, because words are important, I love how Spiers describes the project: “The new development would replace a sea of parking lots…” Yes! Call it by its name! Second, soon-to-be-former Councilmember Mike Jones serves as Village of Faith’s senior pastor, and says, “One thing we know, in Richmond metro and especially Chesterfield, housing stock is a challenge…We started looking four or five years ago to utilize our property.” I like this idea—that faith groups, nonprofits, businesses, and other folks who own seas of parking, should start reevaluating how they use those particularly horrible oceans. Third, this reminds me of an email I got from the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy about potential legislation that would “exempt development of affordable housing on land owned by any congregation or faith community from local restrictions on multi-family use in that zoning,” or, in their words, “a Yes In God’s Backyard (YIGBY) approach.” Interesting! Thus far the General Assembly has balked at allowing localities to do much (if anything at all) in the way of inclusionary zoning, so we’ll have to see what this new-look GA gets up to—and what has the potential to escape the governor’s red veto pen.
 

Karri Peifer and Ned Oliver at Axios Richmond report that the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded a $1 billion grant for building high-speed rail between Richmond and Raleigh. That’s a lot of money, and it will pay for actual construction, not just planning or engineering! Danny Plaugher, director of Virginians for High Speed Rail, “called the grant an unexpected surprise, noting that it was only last year that the project landed a $58 million federal grant, which funded engineering work that is just now wrapping up.” This—plus the plans to replace the Long Bridge north of here—mean that, in some distant future, Richmodners could move about a good chunk of the East Coast by train faster than they could by car. Train projects take forever and a day, though, so I may have turned to dust before all of these cool projects even launch.
 

If you need a list of all the holiday bars popping up around town, Megan Marconyak and Colleen Curran at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have you covered. I count 17 different spots that have gone all in on holiday decorations, which definitely seems like a lot. I’m interested in how this whole thing became a trend and how they all have very specific names, like “Yuletide at Session” and “Now That’s What I Call Christmas at Black Lodge” and “Sippin’ Santa at The Emerald Lounge.” Mine would be called “Jingle Bell Jingle Bell Jing Jangle at Ross’s Living Room.”
 

This morning’s longread

Why We’re Dropping Basecamp

I absolutely loved this thoughtful piece written by staff at Duke University’s library about why they’re dropping the Basecamp project management software. Don’t worry, it’s not about project management software! Instead, it’s about how to make beneficial and, again, thoughtful choices on who and what to support as an individual and as an organization.
 

We simply have our own opinions and our own blogs, and in some cases, we have good choices available to us regarding the companies to which we give our business. After all, we’re the libraries…We also know all too well the very worst of what humanity can create, because we collect it. Our shelves hold some of the most god-awful, hateful stuff you can imagine, in the form of explicit hate literature; and the much larger bulk of mainstream materials we hold are pervaded by casual racism and assumptions of white supremacy. Our job is to maintain it all for research, and to provide the context required for responsible inquiry. We know that our collections as a whole are themselves the legacies of systems of oppression in what they do and do not contain. The entire foundation of our organization was developed on assumptions, in the early days of Duke University, that excluded groups would not use the materials we collect or the services we provide. We know about these legacies, and we reckon with them by considering the harm they’ve caused, and asking what we can do to mitigate it.
 

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Picture of the Day

I got new, better soap the other day, and it’s changed my life.