Culture
Hippie House Music: DJ Puts a New Spin on the Dead
By Leah WorthingtonAround 11 p.m., a curly-haired woman, twinkling in a black, sequined pantsuit, took to the stage to roaring applause. A tie-dye Dead shirt peeked out underneath her jacket as she fit headphones over her ears and hit play.
Nakata’s Smile: Unlocking the Diaries of Jack London’s Valet
By Aleta GeorgeThe reference librarian slid the archival container across the counter. “This looks like a fun box to look through,” he said. I smiled behind my face mask.
A Writer Returns to Berkeley in his New Novella
By Deven M. PatelWriter James Terry, ’92, loved Berkeley and the culture that surrounded it—all the funky moviehouses, legendary bookstores, and iconic cafes, most of which have disappeared with the times.
‘Breaking the Rules’: The artists who abandoned abstraction and helped reinvent the still life
By Emily WilsonIn 1952, UC Berkeley graduate students and artists Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown met and fell in love.
This Iconic Berkeley Bookstore Lives On After Closure
By Emily WilsonEastwind Books of Berkeley, which Beatrice and Harvey Dong took over in 1996 and ran until it closed at the end of April, had a mission to create a community.
A Writer of Books Housed in Libraries
By Aleta GeorgeDorothy Lazard’s first library—the one that cracked open her world and made her love libraries—was the Western Addition Branch in San Francisco.
Converting to Feminism
By Emily WilsonA few years ago, when Heesoo Kwon was visiting South Korea during a summer break from her MFA program at Berkeley, she found old home videos of her family.
He Was British, Not Irish! And Other Things You Didn’t Know About Saint Patrick
By Margie CullenAccording to Dan Melia, there are a lot of myths about Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
Sunset Noir
By Emily WilsonPlaywright Christopher Chen is a homegrown talent. Hailing from the Sunset District of San Francisco, a neighborhood his family has lived in for generations, he went on to study music composition at UC Berkeley, where he got his start in writing and directing after joining the Asian American arts group Theatre Rice.
Hidden Letters: The Co-optation of a Once Secret Language
By Margie CullenWhen filmmaker Violet Du Feng, M.J. ’04, returned to China after earning her master’s degree at Berkeley, she was struck by a kind of gender inequality she hadn’t noticed before.
Saving a Language from Extinction
By Madeline Taub90-year-old Berkeley alumna Rebecca Contopoulou speaks Greek, Italian, French, English, Spanish, and another language that sounds a lot like Spanish but is actually Ladino, a Sephardic language that traces its origins to Medieval Spain.
Berkeley’s Women Artist Trailblazers
By Laura SmithBerkeley claims one of the first graphic novels, famous communist sculptors, and more
