Human Behavior

A Social Media Celebrity Talks Leaving Twitter, Finding Joy

Friends have called me “Twitter famous,” but you’ve probably never heard of me. One night in 2015 I fell down an internet rabbit hole. It started with a list of violent acts against women and stopped  when I read a graphic description of violence against a woman who said the wrong name during sex. I sort of lost it. My thumbs couldn’t keep up with my brain as I tweeted on my phone.

From the Winter 2020 issue of California.

Transitioning with Grace: Coming Out in Academia

For Grace Lavery, coming out as a trans woman was nerve-racking at first. A professor in Berkeley’s Department of English, she was afraid of how her colleagues and students would react. As she explains, a certain amount of criticism comes with the territory of being in academia, adding that, “in my profession, there’s always some degree of anxiety.”

From the Fall 2020 issue of California.

Will Distance Learning Make Education Inequality Worse?

Ever since Bay Area school districts announced they would begin the fall 2020 school year with distance learning due to the still-increasing rate of COVID-19 infection across the region, parents have been scrambling to figure out how to manage their children’s schooling.

Posted on September 3, 2020 - 10:28am

Coronavirus Has Changed the Game for Alumni Travelers

In January of 2014, a woman in her 80s, who sometimes used a cane to walk, stood on a platform hundreds of feet up in the canopy of a Costa Rican forest, getting ready to leap into the sky.

“Nobody thought it was a good idea,” says Darek DeFreece, who was president of the Cal Alumni Association at the time. CAA was leading the trip through its Cal Discoveries Travel program. “I went and talked to her, and she said, ‘Look, I’ve got one more chance to do this in my life, and I want to go.’”

Posted on May 29, 2020 - 9:36am

Housing Insecure Students Face an Uncertain Future

Rebecca Alturk would have graduated from UC Berkeley in May. As she crossed the stage to retrieve her diploma, cheered on by her mother and 6-year-old son, she might have reflected on her childhood living in motel rooms between evictions, or her rocky start at Cal, trying to balance raising an infant with a full course-load.

Posted on May 11, 2020 - 3:46pm

One Man’s Search for Baseball’s Underdogs

Of all the casualties of the coronavirus pandemic, the delay of the Major League Baseball season ranks pretty low on the list, closer to the cancellation of Coachella than the shuttering of all public schools. And yet for many people sports would have been the ideal distraction from the stress and uncertainty of the present moment. Alas, baseball is just one of a long list of things we must do without for the foreseeable. But remember, baseball is America’s most written-about sport.

Posted on May 5, 2020 - 3:40pm

Pages

Subscribe to Human Behavior