Music uplifts the spirit, so we asked soul singer Kim Nalley what to listen to (and watch) while sheltering in place. A die-hard multi-tasker, the Berkeley Ph.D. candidate took a break from cooking, writing, and keeping up with her two kids’ education (she says “Disney+ streaming has been a life saver”) to tell us what she’s into.
Posted on April 9, 2020 - 2:02pm
WHEN CAMRYN ROGERS WAS A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR, she downloaded an app that counted the days until the 2020 Olympics. It was 2017, and the Vancouver native was already a record-breaking competitor in the hammer throw.
Posted on April 7, 2020 - 1:28pm
There aren’t enough tests. That’s the problem now on many of our minds.
The idea for the testing facility was born just two weeks ago, when a virologist in Jennifer Doudna’s lab saw her own projects put on hold.
Posted on April 3, 2020 - 5:14pm
Trapped at home doing laundry without anything to stimulate your quarantine brain? Anna Sussman is here to help. Sussman, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and a senior producer and managing editor of WNYC’s podcast Snap Judgment, shares her top podcasts to get you through the week.
Posted on April 3, 2020 - 11:29am
Over the phone, Olantis Livingston’s gravelly voice is tinged with fear. In addition to a viral pandemic, the 46-year-old must confront a sudden loss of income. Livingston has sold Street Spirit, a Berkeley newspaper covering local homelessness issues, for 16 years.
Posted on April 2, 2020 - 12:44pm
ON FRIDAY, MARCH 13, UC BERKELEY CHANCELLOR Carol Christ announced that instruction for the remainder of the semester would be moved to an online platform, clearing parts of the campus at one of its busiest times of the semester. Many students were surprised, others weren’t. But the majority saw the decision as a signal that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic was yet to come.
Posted on April 2, 2020 - 11:12am
On Wednesday, March 25, Michael Lu, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, hosted a virtual Q&A, “Coronavirus: Facts and Fears,” open to the public. For 90 minutes, experts from the school and other campus health services responded to listeners’ day-to-day fears and practical concerns about navigating life during the pandemic.
Posted on March 27, 2020 - 10:35am
LADAN SANJANI CAN BARELY FOCUS ON TODAY let alone tomorrow. She and her husband, Farhad Jalali, own Pasta Bene, an Italian restaurant on Telegraph Avenue, just blocks from the campus their son attended. Now they are struggling to keep the lights on in the face of a crisis that seems to have darkened every corner of the globe.
Posted on March 25, 2020 - 12:00am
On Thursday evening, March 19, California State Senator and UC Berkeley alumna Nancy Skinner held a phone-in town hall for constituents, focused on the shelter in place orders. As she was about to introduce her guest experts from Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, she interrupted herself with the news that Governor Gavin Newsom had just announced a statewide shelter-in-place order, raising the stakes of the meeting.
Posted on March 23, 2020 - 10:04am
Dr. Steve LeVine has been an emergency physician at Kaiser Oakland since 1989. A UC Berkeley graduate, he completed his medical education at UC San Francisco. As he recalls, he started his career at the dawn of the AIDS crisis and is now nearing the end of his career amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked what life is like in Bay Area emergency rooms at this moment, he likened it to “being in the tide pools when the tide has gone way, way out and you’re looking at flopping fish, and not looking at the horizon for the big tsunami wave.”
Posted on March 19, 2020 - 7:19pm
In the last few months, Amy Qin’s reporting attire has included gloves, masks, and sometimes a hazmat suit. Stationed in China, the New York Times reporter has been on the frontlines, reporting on the coronavirus epidemic and its impact on the people of Wuhan and other Chinese cities.
Posted on March 19, 2020 - 5:06pm
JAMES CARLIN WATCHED A SMALL AIRPLANE snake over the field beyond the barbed wire fence at Deuel Vocational Institution, a state prison in Tracy, about 60 miles east of Berkeley. He’d seen the plane before. It came at daybreak, flying low and trailing behind it a plume of chemicals. As his years in prison passed, Carlin began to notice a pattern. Each time the plane came, red bumps blistered the skin of the men lifting weights on the yard. Carlin had read environmentalist Rachel Carson; he thought the chemicals and the rashes must be related. Then it got worse.
IN NOVEMBER OF 2015, A FEW DAYS BEFORE the Big Game between UC Berkeley and Stanford, California State Sen. Nancy Skinner attended an Oakland Rotary Club meeting. That day, as it often does, the club was discussing athletics, and it had invited antitrust economist Andy Schwarz, a longtime critic of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Schwarz, “a Stanford guy,” shared the stage with the Cal Band, which played Cal songs, before he began his presentation.
There’s money in college sports. Lots of it.
March Madness, the national basketball tournament, alone brings in more than $900 million annually for the NCAA, the nonprofit that oversees college athletics in America. And big-time college football generates even more revenue than basketball. The athletes who play these sports, however, reap none of that windfall and are, in fact, forbidden by the time-honored rules of amateurism, from profiting off their sport.
Last month, we formally launched a comprehensive fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $6 billion for Berkeley—a historic target for any public university and one of the most ambitious in all of higher education.
The goals and aspirations for the campaign connect directly to the challenges and opportunities our University faces at a decisive moment in its life, at a time when our societal and academic role has never been more important.
