Human Behavior
People Are Strange When You’re Sleep Deprived
Got a lousy night’s sleep? Feeling kinda grouchy? Turns out waking up on the wrong side of the bed won’t just make you cranky. It will make others seem that way, too. A 2015 study from the UC Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory found that a single sleepless night can fundamentally alter the way we […]
Vietnam Stories: Writing the “Disremembered” Histories of War
When telling a story, and it doesn’t matter if that story is long or short, fiction or nonfiction, the marginalized writer must be defiant. So says writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. Defiant is not the first descriptor that comes to mind for this particular writer, a Vietnamese refugee and UC Berkeley alumnus, who in fall 2016 […]
Black Hole: The Injustice of Wrongful Incarceration Doesn’t End When the Prison Doors Open
Danny Brown was in prison for almost two decades for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, and he has evidence to prove it: a host of eyewitness accounts validating his alibi, a polygraph test he took, and passed, at the prosecution’s request, and DNA from the crime scene matching that of another man who […]
Mind Tricks: Bishop Berkeley and the Idea of Everything
In Berkeley’s conception, it isn’t just the sound of the falling tree that requires a perceiver in order to be realized; without a perceiver, the tree itself does not exist. Nothing does.
Paint by Numbers: Algorithms for the Artistically Challenged
As a 10-year-old growing up in Shanghai, Jun-Yan Zhu often avoided homework with furtive doodling. He’d sketch comics or movie characters in pencil, then erase the evidence before his mother saw it. Much as he loved drawing, however, he wasn’t very good at it. He dreamed of a world where everyone, even those who lacked […]
Bye-Bye Balance: Skewed and False News Is on the Rise
Democrats are still stumbling around in the smoldering rubble of the 2016 presidential election, struggling to identify just what went wrong for them. Several theories are vying for primacy: voting fraud (or at least, inaccurate ballot counting), the Democratic Party’s disconnect with white working class voters, Trump’s bonding with the same, Trump’s uncanny tapping of […]
Good Job, Brain! How to Create a Pub Trivia Podcast
What radio podcast has three words, one exclamation point, mines the game Trivial Pursuit for questions, and has been produced by three UC Berkeley alums and their pal for the past four years? It’s Good Job, Brain! But if you’re a trivia buff you probably already knew that. Cal grads Karen Chu, Dana Nelson, and Colin […]
All Aboard: Cal Grad Petitions For More Corporate Diversity
Olga Mack was 13 when she accompanied her political refugee parents as they touched down on American soil in San Francisco. She was in an alien world and didn’t speak the language. On the day she registered to attend Washington High School, she was overwhelmed by feelings of being out of place and without a […]
Black Panthers at 50: New Exhibit from the Party’s Go-to Photog
Stephen Shames arrived at our interview with a faded California Golden Bears cap in hand and a black power pin on his lapel. Apt accessories for the 1969 UC Berkeley grad who spent the years between 1967 and 1969 as the Black Panther Party’s most trusted photographer. The baseball cap was old, he explained, and […]
Storming Sather Gate: Two Student Groups Demand Visibility
Recent demonstrations at Sather Gate by LGBTQIA+ students and students of color were covered with gleeful alacrity by the national press—largely because white students were seemingly prevented by the demonstrators from entering the campus. Right-leaning (and alt right) outlets denounced the actions with particular fervor, claiming they were neo-segregationist in intent and distressingly uncivil in […]
Alumni Study: Africans Abroad Still Committed to the Homeland
Even those of us who don’t reflexively shriek “Go Bears” every four or five minutes know that UC Berkeley is one of the finest universities on the planet. The proof is in the sheepskin; if a Cal degree isn’t always a fast track to an executive suite or academic renown, it at least constitutes a […]
UC Berkeley Votes: On-Campus Interviews about the 2016 Election
Not content to believe rumor, California talked to people around campus about the election, the candidates, and whether or not they'll vote.
