FILM: The documentary Bird's Nest: Herzog & de Meuron in China follows two star Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who are building bridges between two cultures, two architectural traditions, and two political systems, as they work on two very different projects: the national stadium for the Olympic summer games in Peking 2008 and a city area in the provincial town of Jinhua, China.
6 p.m. // SF Main Library, Koret Auditorium (100 Larkin St) // free, Registration required
THEATER: There are five nights left of the critically-acclaimed and Tony award-winning Broadway show August: Osage County. The production delves into family dysfunctionality when the alcoholic patriarch of a large, extended, rural Oklahoma family disappears. Academy award-winning Estelle Parsons, of Bonnie and Clyde, Rachel, Rachel, and TV's Roseanne fame, stars as the pill-popping and "deeply unsettled" matriarch.
7:30 p.m. // Curran Theatre (445 Geary St) // $35-65
LIT: Author Rebecca Solnit is celebrating the release of her new book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit surveys disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and examines how crisis throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis.
7 p.m. // The Green Arcade (1680 Market St) // free