What We're Reading: August 2024

Summer is over and what an epic summer we've had! From reading about Kamala Harris's historic democratic nomination for president, beginning with her 2003 run for SF DA and through to the celebratory selfies at the DNC; to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which saw the amazing placing of Cal and Stanford athletes, who outperformed some countries; to our own race for San Francisco mayor heating up (where do the candidates stand on public safety?)—there has been no lack of riveting articles to inform us. Nonetheless, this August edition of What We're Reading is serving up some articles to give a break from the exhilarating and exhausting news cycle we've been on. 

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The best livestream so far this year? A corpse flower slowly blooming

New Scientist, August 10, 2024

Read it in Flipster, an eMags platform courtesy of SFPL

For journalist Annalee Newitz, this was a favorite story to write this year. As they said on the social media platform Bluesky, "Plant time is the best way to get away from social media chaos." Watching the plant slowly grow day by day on livestream wasn't the only draw; spectators also got to watch the blossom's owner cut a small "window" in its spathe in order to be fertilized by pollen from a corpse flower in another state. After 13 years of growth, this corpse flower gave virtual watchers the ability to unplug from tech while using tech, and get pretty emotionally invested in the process.

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She Survived the Maui Wildfires. She Couldn’t Survive the Year After.

New York Times, Aug 21, 2024 

This story, which is available to SFPL patrons through the weblink above rather than in any print edition we can offer, follows the trajectory of wildfire refugee Edralina Diezon following the 2023 Lahaina fires in Hawaii. Having emigrated from her homeland of the Philippines to Lahaina in 2015, Diezon worked as a janitor at a local hotel and managed to survive the wildfires by sheltering there. But, as the article explores, getting help following the disaster was ultimately too difficult.

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SF Investor Uprooting Businesses

San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 20, 2024 

This disturbing piece by business and real estate reporter Laura Waxmann started ringing alarm bells in our neck of the woods as it doled out bad news for legacy businesses like the beloved restaurant La Med in the upper Fillmore. Good news came a few days later in an August 27 follow-up about proposed legislation from supervisor Aaron Peskin that would protect these businesses and was tempered by a contrarian piece in the SF Standard that ran August 26.

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Gen-Z Is Killing the Curveball

FanGraphs, August 22, 2024 

Baseball writer Michael Baumann is a poet! In this online and openly accessible piece, he rhapsodizes about the disinvestment in the curveball by younger pitchers who prefer the slider for its efficiency. Baumann characterizes his beloved curveball as a "calligraphy brush, all swooping lines and fine control," while the "changeup is a Blackwing pencil, rich and precise, its marks here one moment and gone the next." The worse insult comes for the slider: it "is a crayon." Sports writing is anything but dull in this piece, which reads as a sext in praise of the finer nuances of a baseball's movement.