Weekend Reads: Oct. 15-17
Giant pumpkins, an art discovery, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Happy Friday! Greetings from What is California? HQ, where we’re rebounding from the brutal ending of the Giants/Dodgers series with the cautious optimism of next week’s weather: Cool, and maybe even stormy? Yes, please! Let’s goooo, etc. etc.
This week’s What is California? episode is one of my favorites to date, featuring a conversation about California literature with book critic and editor David L. Ulin:
Ulin edited the first volume of Library of America’s Joan Didion retrospective, Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s, and we spent a fair bit of time talking about the high priestess of California letters. Other important authors arose as well—from Myron Brinig and Carolyn See to Chester Himes and Carribean Fregoza—and the show notes for this episode unspool like one of the weirdest, coolest California reading lists you’ll ever see.
I hope you’ll have a listen to that episode, or check out our archives for other recent interviews with compelling guests like former Gov. Jerry Brown, podcaster Karina Longworth, and former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs among others. As always, you can subscribe to What is California? wherever you get podcasts.
Below, find some of the links that have kept me intrigued this week. I hope you'll consider checking some of them out if/when you are so inclined:
Disney Genie grants Disneyland’s wish for more control over crowds - Robert Niles, OC Register
Disney offers a new app that serves as a sort of concierge/travel agent for Disneyland visitors, mapping out and scheduling their itineraries. The idea is to maximize guests’ time and disperse folks as equally as possible around the busy park. But I’m just waiting for the first story about a chipper voice assistant repeatedly insisting, “Make a U-turn to head west toward Haunted Mansion” to someone desperately just seeking a bathroom for their nauseous 7-year-old.
770 new laws coming to California - Emily Hoeven, CalMatters
Who’s up for a blizzard of new state laws and regulations? Phasing out gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers… Year-round fishing licenses, free menstrual products, and canine blood banks… Crackdowns on sideshows and street racing… These and hundreds of other areas are among the subjects of new laws signed this week by Gov. Newsom. Vetoed, meanwhile? Expanding the Cal Grant financial aid program and allowing bicyclists to treat stop signs as yields. Lame.
A deadly fungal disease on the rise in the West has experts worried - Zoya Teirstein, Grist
Valley fever is brutal—the product of fungal spores that take hold in the lungs and swiftly, thoroughly torment the respiratory and nervous systems. I’ve read reports on it popping up over the years in clusters and prison populations in the Central Valley. As explained in this report—by far the best exploration and explanation I’ve seen covering Valley fever—the confluence of climate change, wind and drought mean new exposure for millions more residents of California and other western states. Be careful out there!
‘The Vivian Maier Effect’: An Artist’s Unearthed Photos Reveal a Bygone L.A. - Patrick Folliard, Los Angeles Magazine
A new book showcases the found work of Kali (née Joan Archibald), an East Coast housewife and mother who in the early ‘60s bounced out to Southern California to pursue a bohemian artist’s life. She eventually landed in Palm Springs, buying Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee’s former house and innovating a photographic style that involved “turning the ornate bathroom into a darkroom and using the swimming pool as a giant wash for photographic prints that would become flecked with bugs and sand as they dried on the pool deck.” Kali’s work and her story are both incredible slivers of California cultural history—all the more so for having been hidden for more than 40 years.
Back in Lesbian Paradise, at Long Last - Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner, NY Times
Speaking of Palm Springs, here is a local pool that has decidedly not been turned into a photo bath, but rather has welcomed throngs of queer women reconnecting for “The Dinah”—the festive Dinah Shore Weekend at the Hilton Palm Springs. September marked the return of the Dinah for the first time in more than two years. There’s a twerking contest with facemasks and everything!
Inside The Massive And Costly Fight To Contain The Dixie Fire - Brent McDonald, Sashwa Burrous, Eden Weingart and Meg Felling; NY Times
This story is amazing: Through visuals and video excerpts from the fire lines, as well as interviews and reporting that detail the logistics of everything from hoses to helicopters, you can sense the magnitude of the firefighting effort. You also sense, acutely, that California can’t afford to keep doing this year after year—financially, environmentally, psychically, or otherwise.
Cisco 'leader' who encouraged TikTok followers to report strippers to IRS no longer at company - Kylie Robison and Canela López, Insider
Silicon Valley is warped and myopic and depraved. That is all. Related: Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around ‘Every 5 Minutes’ Yes, there’s video.
Picturing Our Future - Climate Central
Would you like to see projections of San Francisco (downtown and South of Market, or SoMa), Sacramento, Marina Del Rey, the Santa Monica Pier, and the Coronado Hotel in San Diego under seawater from climate change? It’s your lucky day! A caveat from the researchers behind this feature: “These sea levels may take hundreds of years to be fully realized.” Or they may take a generation. Either way, it’s coming, and we’ll be abandoning California before we know it.
2,191-lb. mega-gourd wins pumpkin weighoff world championship - Miramar Events
What’s this?!? A Washingtonian waltzed into Half Moon Bay and swiped the Pumpkin Weigh-Off from his California competition?! It’s almost as bad as the Dodgers defeating the Giants on a shitty check-swing third strike. Anyway, let’s be sportsmanlike: Congratulations to Jeff Uhlmeyer of Olympia, whose one-ton squash claimed the top spot Monday in the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off. Our California pumpkins will get ‘em next year. (🎶 Cue training montage and a giant pumpkin triumphantly bounding up some museum steps.🎶)
And finally… uh… um… did anyone ever get to the bottom of this?
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend!
-Stu