The Edge Episode 6: Are Cities Over?
Posted on November 4, 2020 - 10:27am
pandemic
Will This Pandemic Ever End?
UC Berkeley Public Health Clinical Professor Emeritus John Swartzberg is one of the nation’s leading authorities on infectious diseases and vaccinology—and an eloquent commentator on all things pathogenic, including the novel coronavirus. California caught up with him recently to get his views on the likely directions of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the prospects for a vaccine, and the American response to date.
Posted on October 27, 2020 - 3:43pm
How Will it End? A Q&A on Pandemics, Past and Present
Elena Conis is a historian of U.S. public health and medicine, with a special focus on the history of infectious disease, environmental health, and vaccines.
From the Fall 2020 issue of California.
Shutdowns Hurt. They Also Save Lives.
What would have happened if large-scale policies like shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and business closures were not implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic?
From the Fall 2020 issue of California.
Editors’ Picks: What to Read, Watch, and Listen to This Fall
Our editors have curated a list of entertainment to indulge in this autumn. Here are their top picks of web series, podcasts, films, and more, all produced by UC Berkeley faculty and alumni.
From the Fall 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.
He Was a Leader in Infectious Disease Research Long Before COVID
Regarding the pandemic, here’s more bad news: One of the lowest-paying specialties in medicine is infectious diseases.
From the Fall 2020 issue of California.
Chancellor’s Letter: Navigating A Triple Crisis
I have always said that I like hard problems, but the current set of crises we are facing is challenging even my taste for the difficult. As a nation, we are facing three complexly inter-related series of events—the pandemic, the economic disruption resulting from it, and urgent self-questioning about social justice and systemic racism.
From the Fall 2020 issue of California.
Editor’s Note: Rewriting History
History has been written by the victors—and also by the men, it seems. It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed firsthand in the annals of this very magazine, which started in 1897 as the University of California Magazine and operated for many decades as the California Monthly before becoming simply California, in 2006.
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
Biased Algorithms Exacerbate Racial Inequality in Health Care
From the beginning, it was an ambitious idea. Computer automation would remove the taint of human emotion or prejudice from everyday life. Algorithms—the series of instructions that tell computers what to do—would make important decisions about everything from hiring to health care.
The reality, as Ziad Obermeyer discovered, is not quite that simple.
Posted on August 12, 2020 - 12:27pm
What Comes After the Pandemic?
“The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago,” the author Rebecca Solnit, M.A. ’84, wrote of the pandemic in the Guardian in early April. In a crisis, Solnit wrote, “Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges.”
From the Summer 2020 issue of California.
A “Killer-Type Virus” Ends the World!
LATELY, I’VE BEEN COLLECTING NEWS of wildlife appearing in deserted towns and cities around the world: Wild goats roaming shuttered Welsh villages, jackals skulking in the streets of Tel Aviv, Indian bison ambling along vacant highways in New Delhi, coyotes howling in North Beach. As we shelter in place, the animals are rushing into the void. And not just the charismatic megafauna, either. Witness the legions of dumpster-deprived rats battling nightly on Bourbon Street.
From the Summer 2020 issue of California.
“Liquid Gold”: Meet the Alchemists of Berkeley
Researchers Investigate How to Decontaminate Masks for Reuse
From the Summer 2020 issue of California.
Chancellor’s Letter: How Berkeley Is Responding to COVID-19
The last literary essay I wrote was about dystopian fiction. At the time, in 2016, I had been struck by the publication, within the space of a few months, of a large number of novels offering visions of the future in which some catastrophe—climate change, natural disaster, financial collapse, a pandemic—destroys society as we know it, plunging humankind back into a nightmarish anti-Eden. I was curious about what such novels—written by authors who did not characteristically write science fiction—said about our current state of mind, our anxieties and fears.
From the Summer 2020 issue of California.
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