Cal Culture

Hidden Treasures: Take Home a Masterpiece from Doe Library

Compared to the opulent and tranquil UC Berkeley Morrison Library, the modest adjoining art storage room, at first glance, isn’t much to write home about.

But looks can be deceiving; what it lacks in appearance, it makes up with cultural richness. The Graphic Arts Loan Collection (GALC)—peeling white shelves, offset by dusty linoleum floors—houses more than 800 original pieces of art, diverse as the university itself.

Posted on May 17, 2018 - 4:59pm

Save the Drama For Your Llama: Cal’s First Llamapalooza

It was a Friday morning and I was feeling distressed, unsettled. Maybe because I sensed the stress of Cal students as finals week approached… or maybe it was the bad lamb I had the night before. Regardless of cause, there was one thing for certain: I needed a reason to smile (and to get a paycheck). So I grabbed my notebook and headed to Llamapalooza, UC Berkeley’s first llama festival, in the hopes of lightening my emotional load.

Posted on May 1, 2018 - 2:54pm

The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook Celebrates the Unusual and Unknown

When I go to Berkeley Bowl with Laura McLively, I immediately feel like a tourist, too delighted to keep my cool among the rows of citrus and loose leafy greens. Used to produce sold in hard plastic clamshells at my Los Angeles Trader Joe’s, I marvel at the wall of eggplants, not just purple but white, green, and some—like the tiny, speckled Indian graffiti eggplant—all three colors at once.

Posted on April 26, 2018 - 3:15pm

New Report: How UC Can Meet Its Ambitious 2025 Carbon Neutrality Goal

The University of California believes it can go carbon neutral by 2025. That means zero carbon emissions from powering its buildings and vehicles on all ten campuses. But according to a recent report and related commentary by experts from across the system in the journal Nature, it could be a tough goal to reach. That’s a position shared by Berkeley professor and energy expert Dan Kammen, who was not affiliated with the report. “We’re not actually on pace for our 2025 goal,” he said—more like 2035 or 2040.

Posted on April 23, 2018 - 1:25pm

Retiring Cal Bands Director Robert Calonico’s Many Musical Lives

Robert Calonico hasn’t been leading a secret life, but his nocturnal activities might shock the thousands of students who’ve played under his baton. During his four-decade career as a band director, including a 28-year reign as Cal’s director of bands, which is rapidly coming to an end, Calonico has quietly maintained a thriving practice as a top-shelf saxophonist and clarinetist. 

Posted on April 17, 2018 - 2:51pm

Chancellor’s Letter: Planning for Change

It is a time of great change both at Berkeley and across all of higher education. Many of the parameters that shape colleges and universities are undergoing rapid transformation—funding models, student expectations, demographics, the ways in which we receive and communicate information. In order to thrive in this environment and era of change, I believe that we must collectively establish a cohesive, well-reasoned, and ambitious vision of what our university should be in order to properly set institutional priorities and determine campus investments.

From the Spring 2018 Edibles and Potables issue of California.

The Canna-beat Cub

Everyone’s talking about marijuana—not to mention smoking it, eating it, vaping it, or rubbing it all over their bodies.

Just the other day, the San Francisco Chronicle GreenState website announced the winners of its 2018 Cannabis Awards. The Hepburns took the prize for “Best Pre-Rolls” and Kyle Kushman took the honors for “Best Cultivator.” HerbaBuena and its sensual lubricant won for “Best Intimacy Product.”

Berkeley, of course, won hands down for “Best Cannabis City.”

From the Spring 2018 Edibles and Potables issue of California.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Cal Celebrate 50 Years Together

When the Alvin Ailey dancers are in the house, Zellerbach can feel more like a church than a theater. When the doors open, the audience members file in like parishioners. Some are regulars, while others are first timers, but when the curtain comes up it doesn’t matter. Young, old, student, professional, black, white, devout, secular, right, left; the differences between them disappear during the rapturous gospel of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Posted on April 10, 2018 - 4:47pm

Physics to Foodstuffs: A Q&A with Nobel Laureate Barry Barish

If Barry Barish ’57, Ph.D. ’63, looks familiar, perhaps it’s because we profiled him in this very same space last issue.

In that article, we took pains to explain the nature of Barish’s work as director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, for which he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Little did we know we’d be featuring him again, this time as CAA Alumnus of the Year.

But, hey, fine with us. When the company’s good, who doesn’t like a second helping?

From the Spring 2018 Edibles and Potables issue of California.

Rorschach on Skis: Elizabeth Swaney’s Terrible Olympic Halfpipe Peformance—And Us

Elizabeth Swaney’s day-to-day life is not unlike that of any other Olympic athlete. She trains with a coach in Park City, Utah, and spends hours practicing her sport, freestyle skiing. She works multiple jobs—eight, at one point, by her count—in order to make ends meet. And just like any other Olympian, she expected all that hard work to pay off during the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

Posted on March 14, 2018 - 5:06pm

Student, Doctor…Spy? The Secret Life of Maurice Fruit

In early 1918, a 26-year-old Russian émigré named Maurice Fruit enrolled as a freshman at UC Berkeley. He threw himself into campus politics, helping organize a socialist club and announcing to a dean that he was “thoroughly in sympathy” with the Bolsheviks who had just seized power in Russia. He also claimed to have been friends with Leon Trotsky.

Posted on March 1, 2018 - 11:29am

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