Culture
Following the Yellow Brick Road to Obsession: Berkeley Librarian is All About All Things Oz
Peter Hanff was 3 years old when he stumbled across the Land of Oz; his father had 10 Oz titles and began reading them to his son before bed. The boy quickly became entranced by L. Frank Baum’s stories and the illustrations. It was the start of an obsession that would lead him to his […]
An Unusual Life Unfolding: Noted Bear Biologist Gains Acclaim in Origami World
Bernie Peyton is profoundly dyslexic, and that made his early years growing up in New York City difficult. School was hellish: He struggled to read, he was bullied, and it was hard to make friends. Then when he was 9, his stepfather gave him a book that changed his life. Peyton still has the book—a […]
Rhumba Ray’s Rhapsodies: Meet the Man With the Horn on the Berkeley Campus
Walk on the UC Berkeley campus, you’re likely to hear Rhumba Ray’s music. Strike up a conversation, and you can listen to the rhythms of life behind that music.
What Sparked This Pulitzer-Winning Novelist? Dual Life, ‘Mind-Blowing’ Berkeley & a Movie
For over 20 years—before 9/11 and Black Lives Matter and Trump’s wall-building scheme, before “white privilege” and “male privilege” were common phrases—Viet Thanh Nguyen was wrestling with questions of social justice and power. For years he dreamed of writing a novel that would explore these important concepts in a well-crafted, entertaining, even funny way. And […]
More Than It’s Cracked Up to Be: Cal Crowds to ‘Hear’ World’s Biggest Bell
For three centuries, the largest bell in the world has stood silent in Moscow, unable to be rung. But this weekend—thanks to 21st-century computer wizardry—crowds visiting the Cal campus will be among the first to hear it. Well not it, exactly. But a team of scholars and musicians from UC Berkeley and elsewhere devised a […]
Berkeley’s Bravest: The Cal Scholar Who Inspired Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Hero
Six feet, two-and-a-half inches tall, rangy and handsome, Robert H. Merriman was 23 years old when in the fall of 1932 he began studying at UC Berkeley for a Ph.D. in economics. A fellow student in his department, John Kenneth Galbraith, called him “the most popular of my generation of graduate students at Berkeley. … […]
“Did You Kill Anybody?” I Just Didn’t Say Anything, Because People Didn’t Have a Clue
I enlisted in 1966, in the Navy, so that I wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. But it didn’t work out that way. I was sent to work as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy’s swift boat operations in Qui Nhon, north of Nha Trang; beautiful country, beautiful people. We had about ten boats operating there, […]
Angels, Protesters and Patriots: What a Long-Ago Skirmish Says About Love of Country
Lately, I’ve been thinking about an incident that happened in 1965, seven years before I was born. It centered on an antiwar protest in Berkeley, one of the first of countless such protests to come. Though just a blip in the grand scheme of Vietnam era turmoil, it seems to point to something important about […]
The Extremes of Human Experience: Maybe That’s What Attracts Men to War
I registered for the draft when I was 18 and was called up in March 1944, just five years after my parents and I had arrived in the United States as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. I still hadn’t finished high school and was technically an “enemy alien.” My eyesight was so bad that I […]
Opium Dreamland: Reporter Sam Quinones on Heroin, Pills and his Punk-Rock Roots
Punk rock, which was big during the years writer Sam Quinones spent at UC Berkeley, turned out to be more than just the background noise of an undergraduate life. For Quinones, who double-majored in economics and American history, it provided an opportunity. He produced several punk shows while he was a student living at the […]
Shooting on the Edge: War Photographer at Cal to Sharpen His Storytelling Skills
When Shawn Baldwin talks about the “discomforts and mishaps” of life, he doesn’t mean the little pebble-in-your-shoe inconveniences that annoy the typical American. He’s referring to the time he was kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq, blindfolded, and had a gun pushed against the side of his head, on and off, for about 12 hours. (A […]
Artist Interned: A Berkeley Legend Found Beauty in “Enormous Bleakness” of War Camp
During World War II, some of the most important work connected with UC Berkeley was done not in a library, lecture hall, or lab—but from within the barbed-wire confines of internment camps.
