When he embarked on his freshman year at UC Berkeley in 2014, Esteban Vasquez was set to become the first in his family to graduate from college. A couple of months in, he was ready to drop out. Read more about Food for Thought: Making a Dent in the Crisis of Student Hunger at UC Berkeley »
Posted on May 11, 2016 - 1:52pm
UC Berkeley sophomore Anthony Carrasco loves his Monday afternoon class lecture on the History of Punishment, but sometimes the torture feels a little too literal.
“Instead of thinking about the Panopticon, I start thinking about heating up the stove and frying eggs. I start to imagine all the things I could put on the eggs: cheese, hot sauce, salt, pepper,” he says. “It’s very difficult to process everything that’s going on and deal with just being really hungry.” Read more about Hunger at UC Berkeley: A Sizeable Share of Students are Financially Forced to Skip Meals »
Posted on May 10, 2016 - 12:02pm
Bernie Peyton is profoundly dyslexic, and that made his early years growing up in New York City difficult. School was hellish: He struggled to read, he was bullied, and it was hard to make friends. Then when he was 9, his stepfather gave him a book that changed his life.
Peyton still has the book—a beautifully illustrated instruction manual on origami by Isao Honda that contains examples of various works pasted to the pages. He recently opened the volume in his Berkeley home, and thumbed through it reverently. Read more about An Unusual Life Unfolding: Noted Bear Biologist Gains Acclaim in Origami World »
Posted on May 3, 2016 - 12:35pm
Tales of internship compensation are typically depressing, in that there is, all too often, no compensation. But in the spirit of misery loving herself some company, recent findings by a UC Berkeley student revealed how much students are being offered for summer internships at top U.S. tech companies—finally giving people with “real jobs” a turn to feel sad and underappreciated. Read more about Are You Paid Less Than a Tech Intern? Cal Student Conducts Eye-Opening Survey »
Posted on April 28, 2016 - 5:07pm
It is April 12, one day before the Golden State Warriors will barge into NBA history with their 73rd victory of the season, and practice is winding down at the team’s downtown Oakland headquarters.
Stephen Curry lofts majestic three-point shots at one basket, as usual. Klay Thompson sharpens his silky-smooth release nearby. And on an adjacent court, backup point guard Shaun Livingston unleashes a stream of friendly trash talk in a spirited one-on-one game against…who, exactly? Read more about Victory Vantage: Ex-Cal Star Shares New Life on Warriors Coaching Staff »
Posted on April 27, 2016 - 1:11pm
I have been incarcerated most of my life, in and out of juvenile facilities as a minor, and as an adult I’ve been in and out of the prison system therefore spending many years in solitary confinement. My first experience of solitary confinement was in 2001. Being behind bars in a cell is bad enough, but getting placed in “The hole” is a dark, lonely, and eerie place. There is a misconception that society has. Read more about A Line in the Darkness: In Solitary, a Letter from the Outside Can Be Everything »
Posted on April 21, 2016 - 5:39pm
For over 20 years—before 9/11 and Black Lives Matter and Trump’s wall-building scheme, before “white privilege” and “male privilege” were common phrases—Viet Thanh Nguyen was wrestling with questions of social justice and power. For years he dreamed of writing a novel that would explore these important concepts in a well-crafted, entertaining, even funny way. And that, in turn, would coax people to keep reading, even the parts that many Americans would like to ignore, and ultimately it would inspire them to look at themselves and the world with fresh eyes. Read more about What Sparked This Pulitzer-Winning Novelist? Dual Life, 'Mind-Blowing' Berkeley & a Movie »
Posted on April 21, 2016 - 6:49am
In 2000, Tina Rosenberg, a journalist for The New York Times, pitched a story for its Sunday magazine about the AIDS epidemic ravaging the world’s poorest nations. She wanted to show how pharmaceutical companies had pressured governments in sub-Saharan Africa, where 1 in 12 adults were living with HIV or AIDS, to deny access to generic drugs, making treatment unaffordable.
Her editor’s response: “I cannot subject our readers to another 7,000-word story on how everybody is going to die in Malawi.” Read more about Poor Journalism: Is Media Coverage of the Poor Getting Better or Worse? »
Posted on April 6, 2016 - 4:08pm
You hear the plaint often enough from Americans of a certain political persuasion: Muslims aren’t doing enough to condemn extremists in their ranks. Even if they don’t advocate violence, the rationale goes, they encourage it by refusing to confront those who do. Read more about Battling Extremism By and Against Muslims: Cal Students to Stage "True Islam" Event »
Posted on April 4, 2016 - 11:36am
In online dating, a picture is worth much more than a thousand words. When Christian Rudder, a founder of OKCupid, analyzed the dating website’s data, he found that profile photos drove 90% of users’ choices. With so much riding on a split-second impression, what’s the best way to impress potential mates? Read more about Stretch Your Appeal: In Fast-Paced Dating World, Take Up Space to Stand Out »
Posted on March 31, 2016 - 7:21am
Lately, I’ve been thinking about an incident that happened in 1965, seven years before I was born. It centered on an antiwar protest in Berkeley, one of the first of countless such protests to come. Though just a blip in the grand scheme of Vietnam era turmoil, it seems to point to something important about America and the nature of patriotism.
It starts with a guy named “Tiny.” Tiny was 6’7” and 300 pounds. And he really liked to fight. Read more about Angels, Protesters and Patriots: What a Long-Ago Skirmish Says About Love of Country »
We all have a certain subset of memories burned deep in our forebrains: images so vivid, so invested with emotion that the decades serve to sharpen rather than diminish their resolution. It could be a few mental frames from childhood: a tableau of mother and puppy on a vast expanse of lawn. Or a traumatic event: the onrush of ruby brake lights just before a collision. Such memories seem fixed in amber, impervious to time; richly detailed images that can be examined again and again from all aspects. Read more about All Quiet on the DMZ: The History of the Cold War Didn't Always Make History »
I’d been sitting there for 30 minutes staring at my Arabic homework when Elijah texted me.
What do you think about getting together around 5?
Sure
OK where you wanna meet at?
I’m studying at Peet’s on Telegraph if that’s cool with you
Clifford Stoll is currently the sole proprietor and sole employee of Acme Klein Bottles, a business he runs out of his home on Colby Street in North Oakland. One of the quirky company’s many mottoes is, “Where yesterday’s future is here today.” Read more about How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians—and Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects »
The way Alysia Montaño sees it, she should have one Olympic and two world championships medals, instead of none. The former UC Berkeley runner finished fourth in the 800 meters at the 2011 world championships, fifth in the 2012 London Olympics, and fourth again at the 2013 world championships. In each of those races, she finished behind athletes who now face bans after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. Read more about 'Once a Doper, Always a Doper'—Olympic Runner Denounces 2nd-Chance Racers »
Posted on March 23, 2016 - 4:42pm
