1. P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance
By Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau, M.A. ’06, Ph.D. ’10
Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau could not have known, when they set out to coauthor a book about the performer known as Bad Bunny, that there would never be a better moment to write about Bad Bunny. Less than a week after P FKN R was published in January 2026, the singer won the Grammy for Album of the Year—the first ever awarded to a Spanish-language record. He also toppled Taylor Swift as Spotify’s most-streamed artist and headlined one of the most-watched Super Bowl halftime shows in history—entirely, to the dismay of some, in Spanish!
Still, if anyone could have predicted that 2026 would be the year of Bad Bunny, it was them. Both longtime observers of his rise, Rivera-Rideau, the chair of American studies at Wellesley College, taught what is believed to be the first university course devoted to Bad Bunny. Díaz, an ethnographer, documentary filmmaker, and associate professor at Loyola Marymount University, has taught “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico” every semester since 2023. Together, they created the Bad Bunny Syllabus, a free platform where educators and fans can explore Puerto Rican culture and politics through the reggaeton star’s music.
P FKN R, then, is less a hagiography than an academic study of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the eldest son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher, raised in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, into what the authors describe as “a ruinous debt crisis, failing infrastructure, and pervasive governmental corruption.” Here, the cultural scholars use his stardom as a lens through which 30 years of Puerto Rican history come into focus: the “unnatural disaster” of Hurricane María, the $70 billion debt crisis of the mid-2010s and the complicated U.S. role in it, the gentrification driven by tax-haven policies, and so on. Bad Bunny’s music, they argue, has always been a response to all of that.
In the weeks after the book’s publication, you could find Díaz and Rivera-Rideau on media outlets across the country, not only discussing P FKN R, but also parsing the symbolism and success of the Super Bowl performance—as well as the right-wing backlash against it. Writing in the New York Times the following morning, they argued that although Bad Bunny “did not yell ‘ICE out’ or otherwise call out the Trump administration directly,” the show was “unapologetically political.” They pointed to the choice to open with a staged sugar cane field, which was Puerto Rico’s main cash crop when the U.S. took control of the island at the end of the 19th century, and to dancers dressed as jíbaros (country dwellers) climbing sparking utility poles as Bad Bunny performed “Maldita sea, otro apagón” (“Damn it, another outage”), a reference to the island’s chronically unstable power grid and the federal failures exposed by Hurricane María. The moment, they wrote, was “an acknowledgment of one of the most painful chapters in Puerto Rico’s recent history.”
The show was also, they noted, “a party … complete with live salsa, perreo dancing and even a wedding.” That duality is what the title P FKN R is meant to capture. The phrase, which Bad Bunny frequently uses in songs and concerts, reflects, as Rivera-Rideau explained on The Edge, California’s podcast, both “tremendous pride in Puerto Rico’s contributions to the world” and “the frustration with many of the difficulties of life in Puerto Rico.”
Despite his astronomical fame, Bad Bunny has remained committed to many of the same causes he championed at the beginning of his career. “I think that gives an aura of authenticity that is really appealing to a lot of people, whether or not they are Puerto Rican,” Rivera-Rideau said. While “not the first Puerto Rican artist to make political statements,” he does it “in a way that is very digestible for people.”
So does P FKN R. Like Bad Bunny himself, the book uses pop stardom as a hook into something larger. You come for Bad Bunny. You leave with history.
—Nathalia Alcantara
Listen to The Edge podcast episode No. 31: “Bad Bunny with Petra Rivera-Rideau”
2. accidental album
By Chris Chu ’07
In the summer of 2023, musician Chris Chu went out for a bike ride near his home in Nevada City and woke up in the hospital with a broken spine and a traumatic brain injury. The doctors all said he was lucky to be alive.
Months of rehabilitation and physical therapy followed, all under the haze of heavy-duty painkillers. It’s a period he barely remembers.
Chu’s family has helped fill in some of the details. But the most emotionally honest account of these missing months is one he penned himself: accidental album, a set of nine indie pop songs that Chu doesn’t remember recording. He released the record in October 2025 after discovering it on his hard drive.
Chu has been a professional musician for 20 years—he’s best known as the frontman of POP ETC (formerly the Berkeley-born Morning Benders). But this album is unlike anything he’s done: Since its release, he’s been hearing from other people who have experienced traumatic brain injuries, which he finds incredibly moving.
And then there’s the fact that he simply enjoys the music. “It’s like listening as someone else, or listening to an artist I like,” he told California. “It’s very, very surreal.”
—Emma Silvers
Read our feature on Chris Chu.
3. Wonder Man
Starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ’11
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a former Cal track athlete and architecture major, stars alongside Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley in this unconventional and charming Marvel production. Mateen plays Simon Williams, an aspiring young actor who has somewhat Hulk-like superpowers he doesn’t want. He’d rather be a superstar than a superhero. Kingsley plays Trevor Slattery, better known in the Marvel universe as “the Mandarin.” Here, Slattery is an aging thespian who may prove to be mentor or menace to Williams, buddy or betrayer. The action, subdued by Marvel standards, is set against a world in which superheroes are viewed by authorities as public enemies. Williams is being surveilled by Agent Cleary of the Department of Damage Control, played by Arian Moayed. Mateen, whose other credits include donning the Black Manta suit in the Aquaman films and portraying Bobby Seale in The Trial of the Chicago 7, more than holds his own with the legendary Kingsley (Gandhi, Schindler’s List). One scene in particular, where the two trade cherished monologues, captures a pure love of acting. This is elevated fare for Marvel fans. Streaming on Disney Plus.
—Pat Joseph
4. Stacks
Last fall, 154 years after its founding, The Daily Californian took a new editorial leap.
Welcome Stacks, the official, general-interest magazine of the Daily Cal. Borrowing its name from the athenaeum of campus life, the magazine is, in their words, an archive of Berkeley, “as it is, as we think it is and as we want it to be.” Even though its staff and editors are pulled from the parent paper, Stacks is something entirely fresh.
True to their promise of “represent[ing] all walks of life,” Stacks’ stories run the gamut. The first print issue, published in November 2025, looks at the few intense “cult-like” Christian groups operating on campus, the dangers of devaluing men, and the inefficiency of California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG), not to mention a black-and-white spread of newspaper cuttings and quotes culled from the Daily Cal archives.
Bold, sleek, and professional, Stacks looks every bit the elite university publication. Whether the mag will truly bring to light the lesser-known parts of town and gown, only time—and the famously opinionated voices of Berkeley students—will tell.
—Leah Worthington
5. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
By Michael Pollan
In Michael Pollan’s latest, the bestselling writer and cofounder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics picks up right where he left off. Having reintroduced LSD, psilocybin, and the like to everyday conversation (and usage) with his popular books and Netflix series, Pollan takes the natural next step, from consciousness-altering substances to consciousness itself in A World Appears. Consciousness, as he discovers, has been enjoying its own kind of rebranding since roughly the 1990s, when none other than Francis Crick, of double helix fame, reclaimed it as a subject worthy of the hard sciences. But the more Pollan learns from cutting-edge neuroscientists, psychologists, and biologists devoting their own considerable gray matter to the mystery of the mind, the less he seems to understand the what and how of consciousness, let alone the why. For the Berkeley professor who has made a career with his distinctive style of immersive journalism, this leads to more than a little frustration and rumination. There are no neat and tidy answers at the end of this particular journey, but that’s precisely its payoff.
—Esther Oh
