Perhaps you think that you shall never see a poem as lovely as the genome sequence of the loblolly pine tree—which, as you undoubtedly knew, happens to be the longest genome yet sequenced.
Posted on April 22, 2014 - 8:31pm
For a young composer, it can be difficult not to seem derivative. The problem is getting beyond one’s background and influences. Caroline Shaw, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for musical composition, faces this dilemma head-on. In her composition notes she often explains which work formed the grounding of a piece. She acknowledges when inspiration for a piece came from Chopin or Hayden.
Posted on April 8, 2014 - 5:16pm
The online world continues to suffer from a severe shortage of WikiWomen—roughly 8 or 9 out of 10 Wikipedia editors are male. But the number of female contributors will grow as a result of the latest free WikiWomen Edit-a-thon, held Saturday in Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley.
Posted on April 4, 2014 - 12:43pm
When students decide to major in philosophy, they are often greeted with shock, bewilderment and parental dismay. And always a few jokes.
Such as: “How do you get a group of philosophers off your doorstep? You order pizza and then throw it outside your yard.”
Posted on March 24, 2014 - 5:16pm
Clark Kellogg, a lecturer in innovation and design thinking at the Haas School of Business, had an epiphany on New Year’s Day 2013. Actually, a friend of his had the epiphany, and he co-opted it.
“With her consent, of course,” Kellogg says. “She told me she planned to post a photograph a day on Instagram. And when she said that, it came to me: I wanted to do the same thing, but with art, not photos.”
Posted on March 24, 2014 - 10:21am
Every two years the Venetian canals echo to the sound of art world back-slapping, chin-stroking, and partying. But the Venice Biennale 2013 was a very different beast. The curator even called it “a rapture.” For a moment, it seemed, the art world got off the merry-go-round and acknowledged the “outsiders” in its midst.
There are cowboy poets, of course—so many that cowpoke poesy conferences, or “gatherings,” are held regularly in most of the western states. But while there are plenty of country and western song lyrics about truckers (“I got ten forward gears and a Sweet Georgia overdrive; I’m taking little white pills and my eyes are open wide”), trucker poets are a scarcer breed.
Posted on March 3, 2014 - 2:22pm
The First World War was an early preoccupation of Cal Performances’ director Matias Tarnopolsky, who lately rediscovered a book of poems he treasured as a child in England. At age 11, he had written his name inside.
“I was profoundly impacted by the British war poets—Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon,” he said, speaking in his office in UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on a recent chilly afternoon. As a music student, he would soon learn that the cataclysm of war accompanied a period of feverish experimentation in all the arts—in fact, the birth of modernism.
Posted on February 19, 2014 - 2:43pm
There is raw, if cloaked, combat going on at UC Berkeley over the core of the campus: the University Library.
Posted on January 27, 2014 - 9:59am
Winter Break is coming, along with relatives who will almost certainly ask questions just like that. Well, we went nosing around Pixar Studios and talked to three Berkeley alums whose answers may surprise you.
Posted on December 20, 2013 - 2:49pm
It used to be that running a college newspaper was a simple business: The editorial staff reported stories, the advertising staff sold ads, and the paper was printed and distributed around campus. Fast-forward to 2013, and things are very different.
Posted on December 13, 2013 - 12:19pm
Would Mark Twain tweet if he were around today? Quite likely—he was an enthusiastic early adopter of the high-tech media of his era and an aphoristic genius. “Not that he’d tell the world what he had for breakfast,” says the Bancroft Library’s Harriet Smith, one of the editors of the two recently published volumes of The Autobiography of Mark Twain.
Carlo Séquin lives in a world of impossible objects and mind-bending shapes. Visiting the computer science professor emeritus’s office is like taking a trip down the rabbit hole. Paradoxical forms are found in every corner, piled on shelves, poised on pedestals, hanging from the ceiling—optical illusions embodied in paper, cardboard, plastic, and metal.
Rebecca Solnit has been described as a “cultural historian,” which is probably as good a handle as any, given her investigative ambit. The author of 14 books and numerous awards—including the National Book Critics Circle Award—she has written on art, music, gender politics, peripatetic tourism and urban trends.
Posted on November 28, 2013 - 4:39pm
Frederick Wiseman’s documentary opus “At Berkeley,” which makes its television debut on PBS Jan. 13, has racked up impressive reviews: Its cumulative critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com is 86 percent positive, and it was a New York Times’ “Critics Pick.”
Posted on November 11, 2013 - 12:22pm
