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Past Event
Fighting Back
Claudia Polsky on Taking Trump to Court
Co-presented by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association
September 17 | 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Each event features an exciting discussion with a Berkeley luminary, followed by Q&A with the audience.
September 17, 2026
Co-presented by California magazine and the Cal Alumni Association
In the spring of 2025, when the Trump administration began abruptly terminating federal research grants without explanation, Berkeley Law professor Claudia Polsky was sure the university would fight back. When it didn’t, she did. Spearheading a class action suit, she succeeded in restoring hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to UC researchers.
Join California magazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with Professor Polsky as they discuss the Trump administration’s assault on higher education, academic freedom, and the rule of law.
Claudia Polsky, J.D. Berkeley Law ’96, is a clinical professor of law and the founding director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Berkeley Law. Before launching the clinic, she spent eighteen years as a public sector and public interest environmental litigator: fourteen as a deputy attorney general in the environment section of the California Department of Justice, and four at Earthjustice and Public Citizen Litigation Group. She has litigated cases in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court; testified before Congress and the California legislature; and drafted and successfully defended environmental regulations.
March 26, 2026
A conversation with Prof. Jodi Halpern and technologist Jaron Lanier
Social media was supposed to connect us to the people we cared most about and yet we’ve never been more alone. Now come AI chatbots promising to be our tutors, therapists, coaches and companions—even our lovers. But what do we lose when we turn to AI for what was once the exclusive province of human connection?
Join California magazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with UC Berkeley Professor Jodi Halpern and renowned technologist Jaron Lanier to explore the seductions and dangers of artificial intelligence against the backdrop of America’s deepening loneliness epidemic.
March 27, 2025
Prof. Poulomi Saha and California magazine’s Pat Joseph discuss what the surge of movies and documentaries about cults reveals about us.
Dozens of movies and documentaries about cults are currently streaming on services like Netflix and Hulu, while the number of podcasts and short videos devoted to the subject may number in the hundreds. What explains this explosion of interest?
Join California magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph in conversation with Poulomi Saha, who teaches the highly popular course “Cults in Popular Culture” and is currently working on a book titled Enthralled, about America’s long obsession with “communities and philosophies that offer total belief and total enthrallment—even and especially as we might claim that we would never ourselves join.”
September 5, 2024
with Hany Farid
Join California magazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with Professor Hany Farid, whose lab has pioneered the field of digital forensics to authenticate media in the age of increasingly credible fake news.
Hany Farid is a professor at UC Berkeley with a joint appointment in electrical engineering and computer sciences and the School of Information. He is also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, Development Engineering, Vision Science Program, and is a senior faculty advisor for the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
March 28, 2024
with Stuart Russell
Join California magazine Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph in conversation with Professor Stuart Russell, head of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, about both the tremendous promise and considerable perils of artificial intelligence.
In 2023, TIME magazine counted Stuart Russell among the 100 Most Influential People in AI. He is coauthor, with Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the standard text on AI, and the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, judged among the best science and technology books of 2019. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, he is also an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics.
September 7, 2023
California magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph and astrophysicist and educator Alex Filippenko discuss Life, the Universe and Everything at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Pat and Alex cover topics including the mysteries of dark energy and findings from the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the Great American Total Solar Eclipse of 2024!
Hello Campers, First, a heartfelt thank you for an amazing summer! My name is Matthew Green, and I am the Financial Reporting & Operations Manager here at the Cal Alumni Association (CAA). I joined CAA about a year ago and, at the urging of Cathy Connelly, I found myself enjoying a weekend at the Lair […]
Cal astrophysicist Eugene Chiang has chased total solar eclipses across three continents. His advice: stop extrapolating from the partial you saw once, and just go.
In honor of Oski’s 85th birthday, the Cal Alumni Association spoke with five alums who served on the committee between the late 1960s and 2025. What emerged was not one story but five overlapping ones, each shaped by a different decade's idea of what Oski should be.
