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Margie Cullen

A Writer of Books Housed in Libraries

By Aleta George

Dorothy Lazard’s first library—the one that cracked open her world and made her love libraries—was the Western Addition Branch in San Francisco.

Special Edition of “What to Read, Watch, and Listen To”

By the editors of California magazine

Try one of these this summer

Nancy Rubin sitting in her backyard home garden (Courtesy of Magnolia Network)

Notes to Selves

By Margie Cullen

In high school, one of Nancy Rubin’s teachers had his students write a letter to themselves that he surprised them with at the end of the semester. 

(Alyssa Case '18)

Saving a Language from Extinction

By Madeline Taub

90-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.

The Pelican Building (Margie Cullen)

Seamus Heaney in Berkeley

By Edward O’Shea

Many Berkeleyans know that Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz taught at Cal for many years. Fewer likely remember that his fellow laureate Seamus Heaney.

Tetons are Awe-ful (Dexter Hake)

Awe is the Secret Ingredient to a Good Life

By Laura Smith

What Dacher Keltner teaches isn’t likely to land you a job on Wall Street or even make you more hireable, but that’s not really the point.

Iris Yamashita (Anthony Mongiello)

How an Unusual Alaskan Town Inspired Iris Yamashita’s First Murder Mystery

By Margie Cullen

Iris Yamashita has always loved fiction writing, but it was a winding road to her first novel, City Under One Roof (Berkley/Penguin, January 2023). As she explained, “I have Asian parents and they really expected me to be a doctor or engineer or something. Writing was okay as a hobby, but not okay  as my main focus.”

(Illustration by Monica Hellström)

Cheered Up: You Can Be a Dancer and a Lawyer

By Rachel Schuster ’17, J.D. ’23 as told to Margie Cullen, M.J. ’22

When I was really young, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

The law school’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky (Irene Yi/© UC Regents)

Discriminatory Bylaws and Free Speech

By Pat Joseph

On September 28, 2022, an opinion piece ran in the Los Angeles–based Jewish Journal that carried the alarming headline, “Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones.”

Clark Kerr [l], former President of the University of California, leaves a meeting of the Board of Regents after they fired him at Governor Ronald Reagan's insistence. (Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Winter Issue’s Editor’s Note

By Pat Joseph

“The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.”

(Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

What to Read and Watch this Winter

The best from Berkeley’s writers and film makers

Dania Matos (Brittany Hosea-Small)

How Berkeley is Improving Equity and Inclusion

By Lizeth De La Luz

Five Questions with Dania Matos, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion