Human Behavior

The Edge Episode 22: The Edge Presents “Climate, Hope and Science” From the Science of Happiness
This month we’re back with something a little different. In the wake of this year’s historic floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, we asked ourselves: What would it look like to take a more optimistic attitude towards slowing climate change?

“I was afraid we’d be isolated.”
By Martin SnappThe official motto of the Pi Lamda Phi fraternity (Pilam, for short) is “Not Four Years But A Lifetime,” and they aren’t kidding. That’s what David Law ’04 discovered four years ago when his wife Veena gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Violet.

Meet Zona Roberts
By Martin SnappNowadays, people look back on the 1950s as the Happy Days, but for the kids who grew up during that time, it was anything but. Hovering over them were the twin terrors of The Bomb and a raging polio epidemic. One victim of the latter was Zona and Verne Roberts’ eldest son, Ed.

“You always have each other’s back.”
By Martin SnappWhen Shawn O’Donnell lost her life on July 20, just a few days after the Cal grad (’04) celebrated her 40th birthday by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, America lost a dedicated public servant and people all over the world lost one of the more memorable people they had ever met.

Notes to Selves
By Margie CullenIn 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.

The Science of Love
By Margie CullenTo help us get a handle on the subject in time for Valentine’s Day, we turned to Simon-Thomas for answers on questions about the biological basis for love, the different kinds of human love, and unconventional arrangements like polyamory.

Awe is the Secret Ingredient to a Good Life
By Laura SmithWhat 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.

The Edge Episode 21: Abolish Race (in Medicine)!
For centuries, doctors have medically treated people differently according to their race because they believed that race is biological. But in the last few years, medical professionals and activists have argued that this is both wrongheaded and can be dangerous to people’s health. In this episode, we talk to Stephen Richmond, a primary care physician and assistant professor at Stanford about the movement to abolish race from medicine and how race and biology do and do not intersect.

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.”

Tackling the Teen Sleep Crisis
By Laura SmithFive questions with Lisa L. Lewis '89, Author of The Sleep-Deprived Teen

Think your ideas are your own? Think again.
By Meher BhatiaWhile most of us like to think we come by our beliefs independently, new research out of Berkeley suggests otherwise.

“I am a minimally speaking autistic person who was not expected to go to college.” Now he’s getting his PhD
By Hari Srinivasan ’22 as told to Laura SmithI was not expected to go to college.