The Oakland teachers’ strike is the latest in a series of recent labor protests that began in West Virginia a year ago and hit southern California last month with Los Angeles’s historic six-day walkout.
Posted on March 1, 2019 - 6:05pm
For Tom Dalzell, a small scratch on the elbow in 2011 prompted a whirlwind of events, one that would take him on a sinuous journey through nearly every street of Berkeley.
The author and labor law activist found his life teetering in the balance after a minor wound became mortally septic. Days later, Dalzell exited the hospital with a reinvigoration for life itself. “I came out very determined to live life very differently,” he says. “One of things I chose to do, as a manifestation of my appreciation of Berkeley, was to walk every block of every street.”
Posted on February 9, 2017 - 3:29pm
Like most businesses this time of year, the Kingfish Pub in North Oakland is decked out for the Holidays, strung with lights and garlanded with pine boughs. There’s a neon sign in the window advertising Anchor Steam Christmas Ale and a wreath hangs in the middle of the marquee that juts out from the low-slung, conifer-green facade and sags like the bow of a foundering ship. It almost looks as if the whole place might sink beneath the pavement. But while many another watering hole has sunk and vanished over the years, the Kingfish abides.
Posted on December 22, 2016 - 12:42pm
When Evelyn Orantes studied history at UC Berkeley, she lived just a few blocks from the Oakland Museum. To her and her roommates the museum seemed as inaccessible as a castle, complete with moat. The Class of ’99 had gotten involved with Chicano politics while at Berkeley, so when she finally went to the museum for its Day of the Dead celebration, it wasn’t to enjoy but to see how OMCA was co-opting the Mexican holiday.
Posted on August 5, 2016 - 12:40pm
Andrea Broaddus considers herself pretty lucky—she and her husband recently closed on a Berkeley duplex next to BART. “We leveraged ourselves to the hilt, but we managed to do it,” says Broaddus, a lecturer in regional and city planning at Cal’s College of Environmental Design. Still, it was nip-and-tuck to the end. The couple were shocked when they began looking for a house, and not simply by the prices.
Posted on June 11, 2016 - 9:48am
The stereotypical student has long had a meager existence—subsisting on rice and pasta, living on the cheap in order to binge on swanky textbooks later. But for students in Berkeley, the most expensive U.S. college town according to Realtor.com, finding a place to live in a highly competitive rental market requires particular creativity.
Posted on October 13, 2015 - 12:35pm
Science tells us that race is in our heads, not in our genes; it’s all a social construct.
It’s an observation that seems to illuminate everything and nothing at once. It makes it sound so arbitrary and trivial—a trick of the mind. And yet history tells us that race has mattered enormously. And the news emphasizes how much it still matters today in terms of what researchers call “life outcomes”: Your chances of securing a loan, for example; or of getting a good education; or of being shot by the police.
A team of Cal students is setting out to demonstrate one possible solution to the Bay Area’s gentrification and escalating housing costs: Go tiny.
By next fall, the group plans to finish building a net-zero energy, approximately 250-square-foot home-on-wheels at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station, a 152-acre plot that the university plans to eventually transform into the Berkeley Global Campus.
Posted on August 24, 2015 - 12:45pm
