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California Magazine Archive

(Illustration using Canva)

He Was British, Not Irish! And Other Things You Didn’t Know About Saint Patrick

By Margie Cullen

According to Dan Melia, there are a lot of myths about Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.

(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.

Jarone Lee

Jarone Lee, MD was named as one of Boston’s Most Influential Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) by Get Konnected and Boston Foundation Asian Community Fund. This recognition celebrates, amplifiesand elevates economic, civic and social contributions of individuals and collected members of the AAPI community. Also, Jarone co-founded a new global, non-profit organization supporting humanitarian disasters […]

Jim Yenckel

Jim Yenckel (’59) reports the fact that he and Roger Samuelsen (’58) each has sported red hair all their lives prompted an exchange of emails decades after they were sentenced in a 1957 Big Game Kangaroo Court to toss raw eggs at each other until the eggs splattered. Jim was City Editor of the Daily Cal; Roger served […]

Anderson Franco

Anderson Franco (J.D. 2013, B.A. 2010) is a Personal Injury Attorney in San Francisco, CA. He founded Anderson Franco Law and is focused on serving the Spanish-speaking community throughout California. He is proud to share that he was recently named a Rising Star by Super Lawyer magazine for the 5th year in a row. The attorneys selected as […]

Shaina Philpot

Shaina Philpot was recently published in the anthology Deserts to Mountaintops: Our Collective Journey to (re)Claiming Our Voice by New York Times Bestselling Author Jessica Buchanan and other contributing authors. Her chapter, “Where Do I Belong?” focuses on the theme of belonging, including her time as a Native American student at UC Berkeley and experiences with domestic violence […]

Benjamin C. Lau

Benjamin C. Lau of nationwide employment law firm Jackson Lewis P.C. has been elevated to principal. Ben is an attorney in the firm’s Los Angeles office and represents public and private employers in labor and employment law matters.

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. 

Phil Wong, Jomar Tagatac, and Erin Mei- Ling Stuart in The Headlands(Kevin Berne)

Sunset Noir

By Emily Wilson

Playwright Christopher Chen is a homegrown talent. Hailing from the Sunset District of San Francisco, a neighborhood his family has lived in for generations, he went on to study music composition at UC Berkeley, where he got his start in writing and directing after joining the Asian American arts group Theatre Rice.

(Cal Intercollegiate Athletics)

Batter’s Choice: Coach Zamloch’s Reversible Baseball

By Dan Schoenholz (B.S. '85; MPP '98)

Unless you’re a hardcore baseball fan, you’re likely unaware of the new rules coming to major league baseball in 2023.

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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.

Hu Xin writing Nushu (Feng Tiebing)

Hidden Letters: The Co-optation of a Once Secret Language

By Margie Cullen

When filmmaker Violet Du Feng, M.J. ’04, returned to China after earning her master’s degree at Berkeley, she was struck by a kind of gender inequality she hadn’t noticed before.