Leah Worthington

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.’”

In August 2019, it was reported that Ring, the doorbell-camera company owned by Amazon, was partnering with hundreds of local police departments around the country. As part of this new collaboration and an increasingly extended surveillance system, Ring provides law enforcement with the video and audio that the device records outside of residents’ homes.

EVEN BEFORE the novel coronavirus struck, an urgent race was on to get migrants out of America’s overcrowded detention centers, where they were already at risk of abuse, malnutrition, a lack of medical resources, and insufficient access to legal services.

Michael Tubbs, the 29-year-old mayor of Stockton, has the kind of life that, if you squint, could convince you the American dream is alive and well. He grew up in Stockton, the son of a single mother and an incarcerated father. He spent his lunch money buying SAT prep books, studying hungry. He eventually attended Stanford and interned at the White House. In 2016, he became the city’s first black mayor.

Matthew Zapruder, M.A. ’94, is a poet, editor, and professor at St. Mary’s College of California. He’s the author of several books and poetry collections, including Sun Bear (2014), Why Poetry (2017), and Father’s Day (2019).

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.