A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness
By Michael Pollan
In his latest, bestselling writer and cofounder of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Michael Pollan, picks up right where he left off. After reintroducing 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 it turns out, has been enjoying its own kind of renaissance since 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 toward the so-called “mystery of the brain,” the less he seems to understand about 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
Stacks Magazine
By The Daily Cal
Last fall, 155 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 Cal’s thriving “cult-like” Christian community, 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 part of an 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 eyes of Berkeley students—will tell.
—Leah Worthington
The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World
By Trevor Jackson, Ph.D. ’17
The climate is in crisis, the average person is deep in debt, and tech oligarchs are cashing in on our degraded attention spans. Is “late-stage capitalism” really to blame? And does it have to be this way? In his new book, The Insatiable Machine, Berkeley economic historian Trevor Jackson traces the beginnings of our economic system before it became the global norm. While capitalism may be insatiable, Jackson finds, that appetite was not inevitable, and the future could be different—as long as we can look that far ahead. “I want people to think more ambitiously about enormous, sweeping social change. We think on much too short of a time horizon, much too narrow of a range of possibilities,” Jackson told Berkeley News. “But I don’t think things are going to continue this way. As Kafka said, ‘There is hope, just not for us.’”
—E.O.
Open Inquiry: UC Arts
Sausalito Center for the Arts
Berkeley has Jennifer Doudna and Ernest Lawrence, Saul Perlmutter and Glenn Seaborg. But it also has Chiura Obata, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Elmer Bischoff, and the brothers Warrington and Robert Colescott. As this upcoming exhibit from the Sausalito Center For The Arts argues, art is just as promising an avenue for research as any physics or chemistry discipline. As evidence, Open Inquiry: UC Arts presents a rich variety of work created exclusively by both current students and recent graduates from the art programs at Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Davis. Visitors will be able to study conceptual sculptures by Helia Pouyanfar ’19 that investigate the permanently transient state of refugees, ceramics from Reniel Del Rosario ’19 satirizing the capitalist marketplace, and vivid paintings by Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán, MFA ’26, that place his working-class, Mexican American family members among the white walls of the art world. This exhibit will be less an art show and more a symposium of creative experimentation, technical innovation, and, for some of the emerging artists featured, thinking too disruptive for the confines of traditional academic journals.
Open Inquiry: UC Arts will be on display until April 16 at the Sausalito Center for the Arts in Sausalito. Not in the Bay Area? You can still see a list of some of the artists in the show, with links to their work, here.
—E.O.
Psychedelia & Cinema
BAMPFA/UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics
The UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics has already filled the roles of research center, educational unit, and advocacy group in the rapidly growing field of psychedelics. Now, it can add film festival organizer to the mix. Psychedelia & Cinema, the center’s collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, explores how filmmakers across the decades have used the full suite of movie-making magic to depict expanded consciousness—and sometimes succeeded in altering it themselves. Recently, audiences were treated to A Scanner Darkly, director Richard Linklater’s animated take on the drug-fueled Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. Dick, the late sci-fi writer and Cal dropout, was no stranger to the weird and cinematic trip. As he wrote in A Scanner Darkly, which was based on his own experiences of the 1960s and ’70s drug culture, “Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head.”
See what’s showing next at bampfa.org/program/psychedelia-cinema. The film series runs until May 10.
—E.O.
