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Cal for All: A Changemaker Mindset for Inclusive Innovation

Join Dr. Richard Lyons ’82 and other special guests as we discuss creating a more inclusive alumni community.

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Cover of the latest California Magazine issue.
Latest Issue

2022 Winter

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All In and Zoomed Out

What started as a way for a group of venture capital besties to convene during the COVID lockdown has become a podcast sensation.
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For Our Print Readers

Changes to Our Print Distribution

In 2023, the magazine will appear in print twice per year instead of quarterly. Learn why.

Featured

Margie Cullen

A Writer of Books Housed in Libraries

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.

(Jack Krusemark)

Scaling the Climate Crisis

Molly Kawahata lives in Bozeman, Montana, so that she can climb frozen waterfalls in the frigid Rocky Mountain winters.

Current Issue

2022 Winter
Harmony, 1982; private collection, courtesy 
Matthew Marks Gallery; © Estate of Joan Brown

The Beautiful Life, Tragic Death, and Fascinating Career of Joan Brown

By Laura Smith

Let's start at the end.
Neshat (right) with subject Malala Yousafzai, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (Jorge Herrerera/NPG/Camera P​ress/Redux)

Berkeley’s Women Artist Trailblazers

By Laura Smith

Berkeley claims one of the first graphic novels, famous communist sculptors, and more
D-O-A-R: U.S. Justice Department attorney and Berkeley Law alumnus John Doar on the long walk to Montgomery, March 21, 1965. (1976 Matt Herron/Take Stock/TopFoto)

The Surprising Story of the Berkeley Attorneys Who Helped Desegregate the South

By Rob Gunnison

Anthony Lee simply wanted to go to high school.
(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.

Top Stories

Zona Roberts (Courtesy of the Roberts family)

Meet Zona Roberts

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 Law family

“I was afraid we’d be isolated.”

The 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.

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

Try one of these this summer
Courtesy of Micki Meng San Francisco

Converting to Feminism

A few years ago, when Heesoo Kwon was visiting South Korea during a summer break from her MFA program at Berkeley, she found old home videos of her family.

Listen to The Edge Podcast

California magazine's Laura Smith and Leah Worthington host The Edge, a podcast for surviving today's modern world.

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Quick Reads

(Cal Intercollegiate Athletics)

Batter’s Choice: Coach Zamloch’s Reversible Baseball

Unless you’re a hardcore baseball fan, you’re likely unaware of the new rules coming to major league baseball in 2023.
Phil Wong, Jomar Tagatac, and Erin Mei- Ling Stuart in The Headlands(Kevin Berne)

Sunset Noir

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

Notes to Selves

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. 
(Courtesy of the O'Donnell Family)

“You always have each other’s back.”

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.

For more than 125 years, California magazine has told the story of Berkeley.

When you support California, you support independent journalism.

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From the Archives

Image source: MORGAN: Julia Morgan Papers, Robert E. Kennedy Library; GEE: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; DIDION, COUGHLIN, DOUDNA, NAPOLITANO, HARVEY: Associated Press

150 Years of Women at UC Berkeley

What a journey it has been. Today's students stand on the shoulders of the late 19th century trailblazers studying engineering and agriculture in rooms dominated by men, and every pioneering scientist, artist, and politician who followed.

Locker Room Talk with the Boys of the Berkeley Gazette

Once upon a time, Berkeley had its own daily newspaper, the Berkeley Gazette, and for a brief, semi-glorious moment, it had two sports-reporting brothers.

Mansie Remembered

I first met Mansie Chew when a practice sheet of written Chinese characters fell out of her father's papers in the Asian-American Studies Collection at Berkeley.

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