This essay of mine was just selected as a 2024 Notable Essay in the annual The Best American Essays series, joining a list of great writers like Lydia Davis, Ben Lerner, Mary Gaitskill, Elif Batuman, and Geoff Dyer.
Pure Blogger
Jason Kottke, one of the blog elders and author of Kottke.org, celebrated Dave Winer’s 30th blog anniversary by calling him “one of the purest of the pure bloggers.” To that, Dave asked Jason what he meant by “pure blogger.
The world sees Japan as a paragon of minimalism. But its hidden clutter culture shows that ‘more’ can be as magical as ‘less’
In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers.
Using ChatGPT to make fake social media posts backfires on bad actors
Instead of radically altering the threat landscape, OpenAI tools like ChatGPT are mostly used to take shortcuts or save costs, OpenAI suggested, like generating bios and social media posts to scale spam networks that might previously have “required a large team of trolls, with all the costs and leak
Dungeon-mastering emotions: D&D meets group therapy
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). A game of creativity and imagination, D&D lets players weave their own narrative, blending combat and roleplaying in an immersive gaming experience.
The Most Sought-After Travel Guide Is a Google Doc
When her friends want to know where to go in London or Milan, they go to Emilia Petrarca. The 32-year-old is a writer by day, but an avid curator by night—not of things, but of places in the cities she’s visited abroad.
Richmond’s Historical Growth
Richmonder has a neat timelapse map of Richmond’s borders in the wake of General Assembly extending a moratorium on annexation through 2032.
The jump from 1942:
To 1970:
Reminded me of a now lost piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch about the 2010 census showing Richmond’s population rising for the first time since 1970. Something I shared on Facebook and really should have blogged about here.
On FB, Thomas MacDonald commented:
I’m interested in this line… “a move later found by the U.S. Supreme Court to be motivated by an effort to preserve white majority power in the city.” do you have any resources you could point me to if I wanted to learn more about this case?
And down the rabbit hole we go…
Quick searches seem to indicate that the result was to force the city to move to a Ward system after 1970 because, despite its population, it only had two black city council members.
From the William & Mary Law Review article published in 1978, “The Federal Voting Rights Act and Alternative Election Systems“:
After the Court’s decision in Perkins, the Richmond city government unsuccessfully sought Department of Justice’s approval of the annexation. Denying approval, the Department stressed that, under Richmond’s at-large electoral system, the annexation transformed the black population from a majority to a potentially powerless minority.
To cure this potential dilution, Richmond attempted to substitute a single-member district plan for its at-large electoral plan. The proposed remedy would have enabled black voters to elect a percentage of the city’s council members equivalent to the proportion of blacks in Richmond’s total population. Unless the new district lines were designed to permit the overrepresentation of black voters, however, the change could not restore the black population’s pre-annexation numerical voting strength. Although the district court rejected Richmond’s proposed solution, the Supreme Court reversed, stating:
We cannot accept the position that such a single-member ward system would nevertheless have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote because Negroes would constitute a lesser proportion of the population after annexation than before and, given racial block voting, would have fewer seats on the city council.
The Court stressed that black voters would not be underrepresented on Richmond’s city council if its members were elected pursuant to a ward system and concluded that potentially dilutive annexations could be approved if accompanied by the municipality’s adoption of an electoral plan that “fairly reflects the strength of the Negro community as it exists after annexation.”
Bottom of page 18 of the PDF and read about three pages, seems to cover the bases.
It appears the Supreme Court found it racially motivated, but accepted that the Ward system would allow representation proportionate to the population so it was OK. Unless I’m reading it all wrong.
This page on Virginia Government and Politics has an interesting paragraph:
The Federal government forced Richmond to adopt a ward system after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richmond was a highly-segregated city, with the black population concentrated in the neighborhoods east of the Boulevard. The number of elected officials from that area was perceived as insufficient, and the system of electing the top 9 candidates citywide was considered discriminatory. In the 1960’s, City Council normally had only one or two black members. Once the ward system was established after the 1970 census, the majority of individuals elected to City Council were black – reflecting more accurately the racial profile of the city population.
So, 1965 Voting Rights Act forced Richmond into the Ward system instead of top 9 at large, which led the city to annex 47,000 Chesterfield residents and made the city majority white again.
And from the SC oral arguments:
SC finding 1. An annexation reducing the relative political strength of the minority race in the enlarged city as compared with what it was before the annexation does not violate § 5 of the Act as long as the post-annexation system fairly recognizes, as it does in this case, the minority’s political potential. Pp. 367-372.
Just an interesting backstory on the growth and the motivation of historical Richmond.
The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals.
Waffle House has its own hurricane index and storm center. Milton is Code Red. Here’s what that means
Common sense would tell you Floridians concerned about Hurricane Milton would turn to the news and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to stay informed about the storm’s impact. But there’s a third source that many in the South are using that may come as a surprise.