The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets
By Thomas Cech, Ph.D. ’75
That RNA is part of our everyday vernacular is rather amazing. Since the discovery of the double helix and the completion of the Human Genome Project, DNA has been the star of the genetics show. Meanwhile, RNA—in the words of Nobel Prize–winning chemist Thomas Cech—was relegated to the status of “biochemical backup singer.” Then, the pandemic hit.
“My subject was suddenly on the tip of everyone’s tongue,” he writes in his new book, The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets. Cech, who shared the Nobel for his discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA, found himself in a new spotlight. “I went from RNA scientist to RNA spokesperson.”
His book is, in large part, a product of that time. Traveling back to the 1950s, Cech recounts the groundbreaking experiments that revealed RNA’s integral role in cellular function and his own team’s award-winning ribosome research. From there, he considers an RNA-centric future, in which the molecule can do everything from reversing the aging process to short-circuiting viral disease to reprogramming our own genetic material. If DNA is a “one-trick pony,” he writes, RNA is more like a jack of all trades—and master of all, too.
For an accomplished academic, Cech is also a storyteller. Part scientific primer, part memoir, his book may offend some researchers with its loosey-goosey metaphors (molecules as turntables, vinyl records, and even spaghetti). But, as he says, “I am not writing this book for them.”
—L.W.
Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays
By Steve Wasserman ’74
From Steve Wasserman, longtime literary agent and editor (now heading up Heyday Books in Berkeley), comes this impressive, if motley, collection of essays, criticism, and interviews culled from a long career in letters and accompanied by a bounty of advanced praise from such Berkeley-connected heavy hitters as Joyce Carol Oates, Viet Thanh Nguyen ’92, Ph.D. ’97, Adam Hochschild, and Hilton Als.
The son of Bronx-born parents, Wasserman came to Berkeley by way of small-town Oregon as an impressionable pre-adolescent in 1963, just in time for the FSM and student rebellions to follow. “Geography is fate,” he writes in his introduction, but while Berserkeley left its imprint, the leftist proclivities were already there. As we learn in the piece called “Commie Camp” about the red-diaper summer retreat in Upstate New York he was sent to as a kid, Wasserman was indoctrinated early. Little surprise then that the young man would one day lend a hand cutting sugar cane in Castro’s Cuba. The title essay is all about the author’s five-decades-long attachment to the Antillean island and U.S.-Cuba relations, which he characterizes, aptly, as a “love affair gone bad.”
It was in books and ideas, more than just radical politics, that Wasserman ultimately found himself and his tribe, eventually becoming the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Moving in literary circles, he came to count as friends many of the most notable scribes and thinkers of the New Left, including Robert Scheer, Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and Susan Sontag, all of whom appear at length in these pages.
Aside from Scheer, Sontag looms largest. Wasserman idolizes her prose and her probity, her intellectual voracity and aesthetic refinement—and, above all, her gravitas. He calls her “a paladin of seriousness” and elsewhere, perhaps overdoing it, “a fearless Joan of Arc of the Higher Seriousness.”
Serious is a good word to describe the overall tone of Wasserman’s book, the contents of which run the gamut from erudite reviews and interviews to fond remembrances and long ruminations on the fate of books and book criticism in the age of Amazon. While the writing is earnest and often tinged with nostalgia, Wasserman’s wistfulness is tempered by the wisdom of years and the experience of having watched idealism sour and once-noble movements devolve into gratuitous spectacle and terror cells.
Along the way, it seems, Wasserman’s own radicalism veered into radical chic, just judging by the meals. There’s Wasserman and Hitchens having an intimate dinner at Chez Panisse, and a lavish dinner with Barbra Streisand at the President’s House at Harvard. There’s Wasserman with Vidal, who’s visiting from his palazzo in Ravello, lunching at the Polo Lounge in the “always congenial” Beverly Hills Hotel, and lunch over scallop salads with Jacqueline Onassis. Of the “four plump scallops on her plate,” we learn, the former First Lady “ate only three.” Do tell.
A reader can’t help but wonder: Isn’t this all just a bit too bourgeois? Surely the old comrades would disapprove. Wasserman puts that very question to Robert Scheer as his mentor picks up a Pierre Cardin suit from Grodin’s, the upscale men’s store in Berkeley. Scheer will have none of it. Marx didn’t want to deny anyone the right to adequate clothing or shelter, he says. “Are those bourgeois rights? What Marx opposed was that it was only the bourgeoisie that got to exercise them. He wanted a world in which the rights of the few would be extended to the many.”
Somewhere over the rainbow, it seems, it’s bespoke suits and plump scallops for everyone. In the here and now, the struggle continues.
—P.J.
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection has arrived at BAMPFA after a successful debut in New York last year. The exhibit draws from one of the leading private collections of work by women artists, owned by philanthropist and Haas School of Business alumna Komal Shah, MBA ’97.
With works by nearly 70 artists across eight decades, Making Their Mark explores the connections, influences, and evolving techniques that link generations of women artists. It features both established and emerging artists, including many with deep ties to the Bay Area, such as Elizabeth Murray, Kay Sekimachi, and Trude Guermonprez.
The exhibit bridges “high” and “low” art, celebrating both traditional and experimental materials. Highlights include pieces using light as a medium in the “Luminous Abstraction” room, Lenore Tawney’s fiber art, and Janet Sobel’s pioneering drip painting, once dismissed as “primitive” and “curious” work made by a “housewife,” but also known to have made a strong impression on Jackson Pollock, who would go on to be celebrated for his drip technique.
Beyond its artistic appeal, this exhibit invites reflection on the systemic challenges women artists face in a male-dominated industry, while celebrating their often-overlooked contributions.
Making Their Mark will be on view at BAMPFA until April 20, 2025.
—N.A.
Creation Lake
By Rachel Kushner ’90
In her new novel, Rachel Kushner paints a harsh picture of a rural France filled with highways, nuclear power plants, and warehouses. This is “the real Europe,” as the narrator Sadie Smith, a 34-year-old Berkeley Ph.D. dropout, describes it—a place of “shrink-wrapped pallets of super-pasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors.”
Sadie—not her real name—is an undercover agent sent to infiltrate Le Moulin, an eco-anarchist collective suspected of sabotaging commercial plans to divert local water resources. Her mission, directed by mysterious corporate or governmental contacts, is to incite the group to self-destruction. She remains pragmatic as she manipulates and seduces members of Le Moulin. Yet emails from their mentor, Bruno—who has retreated to a cave to contemplate humanity’s self-destruction—draw Sadie, and the reader, into a more reflective mode.
Obsessed with the Neanderthals, Bruno—whom Sadie initially dismisses as a “lunatic”—believes the downfall of Homo neanderthalensis marked the moment humanity went wrong. The “cruel society of classes and domination,” Bruno contends, was only possible because Homo sapiens wiped out our closest relatives, “Thals,” as he affectionately dubs them. Gradually, the novel’s themes of espionage, radical movements, and philosophical inquiry seem to unfold into an elegant critique of our modern world.
Widely known for her razor-sharp writing exploring revolutionary politics in novels like The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, Kushner is a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Creation Lake cements her status as one of the most celebrated novelists of our time: It was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award, and became an instant New York Times bestseller.
—N.A.
Altered States
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics
Almost 75 years after infamous LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, Ph.D. ’50, received his doctorate in psychology at Berkeley, the conversation around psychedelics has gone from taboo to casual, even commonplace. With mail-order ketamine, microdosing at work, and ayahuasca retreats, it can feel like everyone is consuming, or at least talking about, psychedelics. But if the psychedelic renaissance has arrived, are we ready for it?
That’s the question behind Altered States, a new podcast from PRX and the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics about psychedelics in the modern era. It’s no longer a story of “renegade counter-culturalists,” says host Arielle Duhaime-Ross; psychedelics have now entered the realm of clinical research, profit-hungry startups, and new drug policy.
The reporting takes listeners around the world to explore the many ways that drugs are used and abused, stigmatized, and commercialized. We meet Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who gather to drink ayahuasca, a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Oregon who leads therapeutic shroom trips, and a former Navy SEAL who—after forgetting his wife’s name—travels to Mexico to try ibogaine as a treatment for traumatic brain injury. Far from pro-drug propaganda, Altered States tackles the difficult and often unanswerable questions, such as: What if ketamine is more addictive than we thought? How concerned should people be about recurring visual hallucinations after a psychedelic trip? And who’s poised to profit off—or suffer from—this new industry?
—L.W.
The Brazil Chronicles
By Stephen G. Bloom ’73
In his seventh book, Stephen G. Bloom explores an obscure chapter of American journalism, this one set in Rio de Janeiro’s bohemian Lapa district.
The Brazil Chronicles is part memoir, part exhaustive research into the history of English-language expat newspapers in Latin America. Tracing a path from one paper’s fierce antislavery origins in the late 19th century to their struggle under the sway of the U.S.-backed Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, Bloom unpacks these papers’ relentless—and at times ethically questionable—efforts to stay afloat in a changing world.
Today, Bloom is a journalism professor at the University of Iowa and an accomplished writer, but back in 1979, he was a struggling reporter who, tired of having his résumé rejected by American newspapers, booked a one-way flight to South America and joined the scrappy Brazil Herald. There, he cut his teeth alongside itinerant reporters of all kinds, from hustling stringers to suspected undercover CIA assets. Through Bloom’s account, we learn about the Brazil Herald adventures of journalism luminaries like Eric Hippeau, who would later become CEO of Huffington Post, and soon-to-be gonzo pioneer Hunter S. Thompson. He also profiles more obscure characters, like John Sullivan, a larger-than-life reporter who went to El Salvador in pursuit of a groundbreaking story, only to be murdered days later.
While Bloom weaves an impressively researched account of Brazil’s history into his narrative, readers shouldn’t expect to learn much about the Brazilian people. Aside from an account of an insular community of racist descendants of Civil War Confederates, Brazilians here remain elusive characters, noted often for their limited English proficiency and typographical errors. Expats, immersed in Brazilian culture, seem to learn little beyond leaving “any notion of punctuality and efficiency back in the States.” Rio, meanwhile, is a “vibrant, exotic port city seemingly constantly beset by runaway inflation and nonstop political instability.” Classic.
To be fair, Bloom tells the history of newspapers published for an English-speaking audience, so perhaps some othering was inevitable. Still, Brazilian readers, like this one, can’t help but wish to see stereotypes debunked rather than reinforced.
That said, the book remains a must-read for the newspaper-nostalgic. Bloom calls his project “a triumph of perseverance,” as editors, not seeing a fit in either the trade or academic markets, doubted its viability. Bloom’s argument: It is both. It seems he assimilated a concept from Brazilian culture, after all: the ubiquitous jeitinho, a knack for bending rules and using creativity to achieve one’s goals. Muito bom.
—N.A.
Danish String Quartet
Cal Performances
The Grammy-nominated Danish String Quartet comes to Hertz Hall on February 2 after the conclusion of its multiyear Doppelgänger project, which paired newly commissioned music with late major works from Schubert’s chamber music repertoire. In this year’s program, the Scandinavians are again curating pairs, this time with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte and a selection from the Haydn quartet it was inspired by, and Stravinsky’s folky miniatures, which converse with songs by 19th-century harpist Turlough O’Carolan. Finally, Shostakovich’s final quartet provides, in the words of the Cal Performances program, “emotional counterballast in a kaleidoscopic musical journey.”
—P.J.
Earth Abides
Berkeley Professor George R. Stewart’s 1949 sci-fi classic, Earth Abides, about a virus that wipes out most of humanity, has never gone out of print and its influence has been enormous. Among other examples, it inspired Stephen King to write The Stand and Jimi Hendrix to write “Third Stone from the Sun.” But only now is the pandemic novel getting film treatment.
Alexander Ludwig stars as Ish, Stewart’s protagonist, in this limited-series adaptation from MGM+. While Stewart’s novel was set primarily in Berkeley, most of the series was shot in British Columbia and the story is set in the present. The event that sets the plot in motion remains the same: Ish is bitten by a snake and falls into a coma. He awakens to find that nearly everyone has died in a plague of epic proportions. An electronic reader board alerts him to the news: “Due to Global Pandemic USA Govt Suspended. Shelter in Place. God Save the USA.”
The six-episode series premiered December 1.
—P.J.
