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Human Behavior

Zona Roberts (Courtesy of the Roberts family)

Meet Zona Roberts

By Martin Snapp

Nowadays, 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.

(Courtesy of the O'Donnell Family)

“You always have each other’s back.”

By Martin Snapp

When 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.

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. 

(Illustration using Canva)

The Science of Love

By Margie Cullen

To 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.

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.

Credit at bottom of page

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. 

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.”

iStock.com/peopleimages

Tackling the Teen Sleep Crisis

By Laura Smith

Five questions with Lisa L. Lewis '89, Author of The Sleep-Deprived Teen

Base art iStock

Think your ideas are your own? Think again.

By Meher Bhatia

While most of us like to think we come by our beliefs independently, new research out of Berkeley suggests otherwise.  

Illustration by Stephanie Singleton

“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 Smith

I was not expected to go to college. 

An Orchestra Conductor, Covid Vaccinations Without the Poke, and a Roma Activist

By Martin Snapp

Although he’s still in his twenties, Stefano Flavoni ’15 is already making his mark on the classical music scene.

gotpap/STAR MAX/IPx

Don’t Bother Trying to Debate Politics with That Uncle this Thanksgiving

By Maia Nehme

A new study by a Berkeley political scientist challenges the long-held assumption that bipartisan interactions inevitably decrease divisions between voters.