Good morning, RVA: RTD has a new publisher, a great gardening column, and trains

Do you know about rose rosette disease? Do you see it everywhere and
constantly point it out to your eye-rolly family?

Good morning, RVA! It's 62 °F, and today you can expect highs in the mid 80s again but with more clouds this time around. Still no significant chance for rain, but that changes tomorrow night so plan accordingly. The last couple of days have been absolutely perfect, weatherwise, and I hope you've had plenty of chances to take advantage of that!

In news news, the Richmond Times-Dispatch announced that Kelly Till will become the paper's new president and publisher—"the first woman to lead the organization in its 172-year history." Till currently serves as the vice president of sales for both the RTD and Lee Enterprises's Virginia markets (that's the paper's parent company), and will now oversee sales in Lee's southeast region. I don't know a ton about the roles of president or publisher at the RTD, but that's a lot of experience from the sales side of things, and I wonder how the newsroom feels about it. Till replaces Paul Farrell, who was also a vice president of sales for Lee before taking the top job at the RTD, but, before that, Tom Silvestri held the role for years. Silvestri had a deep news background and spent years working as a reporter and an editor. Again, I don't know anything about how things work in the newspaper industry these days (does anyone??), but it seems like a choice to keep hiring ad people instead of news people to run the show.

Michael Martz, from the news side of things at the RTD, has an update on adding more tracks at Long Bridge in D.C. and expanding rail service south from Richmond to Raleigh. Long Bridge, which has a pretty interesting history), functions as a bottleneck for passenger rail traffic going to and from Richmond and, if we want decent service between Richmond and D.C., desperately needs expanding. As a spokesperson for the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority says: "It all goes back to Long Bridge." Luckily, federal grants are in the works and by 2030—just a blink of an eye in train construction time—we should have good, hourly train service from Richmond to D.C.! How cool will that be, and how very old I will be when I can finally take a spontaneous trip to the nation's capital!

Grace Todd is back at RVA Mag with another edition of her gardening column, Killer Thumbs. First, this great June advice: "We’re celebrating Pride! We’re telling our friends how much we love them! We’re weeding the garden because it will keep us from doom-scrolling for a fifth straight hour! We’re lying in the wet earth after a thunderstorm, trying to feel close to something larger than ourselves!" Second, tap through and read about rose rosette disease, which, once you spot, you will see EVERYWHERE in town. That's a huge bummer because it means every horrible and infected rose bush you see is most likely both doomed and contagious to other roses. Third, stick around to the end of the piece for a thoughtful bit of writing about the challenging spring, resilience, and sweet peas. Why is this the best local column I read each month??

Graham Moomaw at the Virginia Mercury reports that Paul Goldman's legal battle to re-run the House of Delegates elections this fall has come to an end. Interestingly, the judges didn't super disagree with Goldman, but decided that he personally hadn't had his rights violated and dismissed the case. So we'll have the regularly-scheduled 2023 elections, which are right around the corner and are absolutely critical. Electing a Democratic majority in the House is the next best way to reinforce the Senate's brick wall against the inevitable attacks from Republicans on abortion, gun safety, and voting rights.

It's Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker about the fascinating life of shipping containers! What more do you need to know? Set aside some time this morning for this wonderful piece or save it as a special weekend treat for yourself (which is totally something other people do, too, right?).

Things have been tumbling off boats into the ocean for as long as humans have been a seafaring species, which is to say, at least ten thousand and possibly more than a hundred thousand years. But the specific kind of tumbling off a boat that befell the nearly five million Lego pieces of the Tokio Express is part of a much more recent phenomenon, dating only to about the nineteen-fifties and known in the shipping industry as “container loss.” Technically, the term refers to containers that do not make it to their destination for whatever reason: stolen in port, burned up in a shipboard fire, seized by pirates, blown up in an act of war. But the most common way for a container to get lost is by ending up in the ocean, generally by falling off a ship but occasionally by going down with one when it sinks.

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