What I've Been Reading: May 2024 Edition
Mysteriously pregnant stingrays! A crumbling newspaper building! An egregiously racist statue! Here are a few stories that gave me a lot to think about lately.
“What Is Really Going On With Charlotte the Stingray?” by Emily Cataneo, The Assembly
The Assembly published a story about Charlotte the stingray of Hendersonville, which mysteriously became pregnant despite the fact that there isn’t another stingray in her aquarium tank. This isn’t impossible—there is a process called parthenogenesis in which stingrays can reproduce asexually—but the Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO’s owner had declared that another possibility was that Charlotte mated with a shark, and that we might get some shark-ray babies. That is impossible, scientists say. Either way, the story was weird enough that it went viral and global.
A few things about that. One: Going viral is generally a bad thing, because it’s basically like putting up a giant flag that says “Hey everyone, immediately scrutinize every single bit of my words or video, and also please review everything else I’ve ever said or done.” Or, in Twitter terms, once you become the main character, eventually you get milkshake duck’d. If you make an outlandish claim, like, say, that a shark and stingray are gonna have babies, you can’t really ever take that back in the internet’s eyes (even if you do take it back, which is what the aquarium did). Finally, if you go viral by saying something is going to happen, then people are going to check to see if that thing, uh, happens.
Like journalists! Emily Cataneo wondered why Charlotte hadn’t had her stingray babies by now, and so she started asking questions as journalists are wont to do. That eventually led to a trip to Hendersonville. Nobody from the aquarium would do an interview, so Emily asked if it was okay to just buy a ticket and just take a look. That was fine, staff said, so she did. Afterward, she hung out on the sidewalk, looking to talk to a few people. That’s when the police came and told her that they’d gotten a call that she’d been harassing people. She could stay on the sidewalk and respectfully talk to folks, but that was it:
They told me that [the aquarium’s owner] wanted them to book me for “trespassing.” They weren’t going to charge me with anything, they said—I looked “sweet.” But if I went back into the aquarium, they would have no choice but to arrest me.
This was my second dust-up with police in 15 years of journalism. The last one was reporting on neo-Nazis in Germany. This one was about a stingray.
You should read the whole story, because it’s a damn journey. I can only add a few more things here. Back in 2016, I went to Hendersonville to write about how the town had sorta become a tourism suburb for Asheville. It was less crowded, had some of the same charm, and really did have some interesting things! Like an aquarium! I rolled up on it as a elderly couple was marveling at a pair of South American red foot tortoises. They were out on the sidewalk in front of the aquarium, and clearly trying to escape from the plastic baby pool they were in. I didn’t go inside, but it seemed like a regular small storefront downtown.
This place billed itself as North Carolina’s only “inland” aquarium, and it’s wedge in between the Mast General Store and a gift shop. There’s no rule against having sharks and stingrays in a smallish mountain town. But again, it’s not something you’d expect.
“Warren Buffett: It’s Not a Wonderful Life” by Lorraine Ahearn, Triad City Beat
I spent most of Tuesday in downtown Greensboro working remotely, where I discovered a few things:
There are a ton of power outlets around LeBauer Park, and none of them worked.
Cincy’s, which is the only Cincinnati chili-focused restaurant in North Carolina (that I’m aware of) was closed. It’s been in downtown Greensboro since 1986, and is only open from 11a-2p, Wednesday through Friday. I would love to know how the financials work out there.
The main library seems to have fewer and fewer books in it every time I go? There are entire sections of shelves that seem to have been cleared out. I don’t know why this is? Maybe I should find out?
I also walked by the News & Record’s former building, which is currently being turned into rubble. Lorraine Ahearn, the paper’s former metro columnist, wrote a wrenching, angry remembrance as she watched her former workplace come down. Of note: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought the News & Record when everyone knew that newspapers were having a hard time, then sold them and stands to make a lot of money off of interest payments from the paper’s new owner. It still owns the land that the newspaper once sat on, which is now prime real estate.
One more note: The paper has an amazingly deep and easily searchable online archive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to look for something from the 1990s, and Google sends me a link from greensboro.com. It’s amazing! That’s, obviously, the work of some dedicated archivists from way back in the day. I’d love to know why this was a priority for the paper back then, but it’s been incredibly helpful for me over the years.
“Black residents in North Carolina county sue to remove racist statue” by Gloria Oladipo, The Guardian
In Tyrrell County, the people outnumber the bears, but not by much. The human population there was, at last count, 3,365. There are, in eastern North Carolina, a few thousand bears. They are very large. Hunters occasionally shoot black bears that weigh upwards of 600 pounds.
Back in 2015, some bears ate a woman in Tyrrell County named, appropriately, “The Bear Lady.” She’d died in a swampy and forested area where she’d lived near U.S. 64. She’d dedicated her life to protecting the animals from hunters, and had been fairly litigious during that time. I was researching a potential story about her, and stopped in at the Tyrrell County Courthouse to pull some old court files. The entirety of all litigation in the entire county since 1985 fit on a mere five shelves.
Outside, there was a Confederate statue. This, in itself, wasn’t all that unusual, and so I didn’t go take a closer look. Had I done so, I would have seen this phrase on the side: “In Appreciation of our Faithful Slaves.”
Last week, some Black citizens in Tyrrell County sued to get the whole thing removed:
“I think this is the most egregious statue I’ve ever seen,” [attorney Jaelyn Miller of Emancipate NC] said on Friday.
“Most Confederate monuments have ‘In appreciation of our Confederate soldiers’ or some veteran monument language. This has explicitly racist language referencing slavery [and] implying that the ancestors of our clients preferred slavery to freedom,” she added.
Years later, Republican lawmakers made it harder to remove Confederate statues on state property, but the North Carolina Supreme Court said those rules didn’t apply to county property, so we’ll see how this goes. Maybe some bears can pull it down.
Someone already told you about Lupies, for which only you are to blame for not knowing about as a former Charlottean yourself :-).
But, I can tell you a bit about Libraries generally without speaking to Guilford County Public specifically (I know someone that might be able to speak about them specifically off the record if you're interested). Anyway, you maybe ARE seeing fewer books in the library. There's a few things happening here.
First, library budgets have been pretty static since the pandemic, but like everything else books have gotten more expensive due to inflation. That means the Libraries have fewer real dollars to buy books with - especially public libraries that have a model based on a lot of collection turnover due to the "popular" nature of the materials.
Second, reading habits are shifting to eBooks and audiobooks. This was a trend pre-COVID, but it accelerated substantially during the pandemic when people didn't know if they could touch things and get COVID (remember that?) and when libraries were straight closed. The problem is that these formats are way more expensive than a print book. If I want an eBook of a popular fiction title for my collection, it's $80 compared to $20 for the paperback copy. But the demand for these formats is growing while budgets are flat and inflation is driving prices up across the board. What do you do? Well, you probably buy fewer print books to start with and that means fewer books on the shelves. But we see, over and over, that people are OK with that for the most part - or at least they complain about it less than they would complain if they couldn't get their audiobooks (side note: I LOVE audiobooks. It's probably my primary way to reading these days because between an 18-month-old and work, most of my personal time is spent asleep or writing comments on the internet).
Third, people want space. They come to libraries to do the same things that can do at Starbucks or whatever replaced WeWork, but without being harassed to buy something. They want study space, meeting space, quiet space, space for their kids, space for their laptop, and computer labs which also take up space. More space devoted to those things means less space for shelves of books. That's OK. Public libraries are public commons. They're conveners and incubators of new ideas. But those computers cost money. The chairs and tables and desks and meeting rooms and study rooms and loanable laptops all take up...space on a limited footprint. So you see fewer books in general because people are looking to public libraries for other services in addition to the books. It's a balance, of course, because without the books libraries are nothing. But people do want that space and we want to meet their needs.
Anyway, that's a waaaayyyy more in depth view of why you *might* be seeing fewer books on the shelves these days. Support your local library please!
You absolutely need to chase down WTF is happening with the library. From 1969-1971, as a student at Oak Ridge (when it was the "Military Institute"), the two havens I had on the weekend with my $5 weekly stipend was the cafeteria at Friendly Center, whose name I've sadly forgotten but DCETG (don't care enough to Google), and the library, with its boundless supply of books as well as newspapers from around the country, including the godless NYT. Oh, and the smell of the place...it smelled of - wisdom.