2009 Fall Constant Change
A Great Aspiration
Cal wants to be both elite and equitable. It’s proving difficult. When Senatorial candidate Barack Obama entered the national stage in 2004 with a speech that passionately advocated for an end to the political thin-slicing of the American identity—red states, blue states, soccer moms, NASCAR dads, yuppies, buppies, bobos, and the like—a new term entered the […]
Kraus/Nixon: Memories of a Ramparts alum
In April, Jerelle Kraus visited Berkeley to promote her new book, an insider’s look at The New York Times Op-Ed pages called All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t). Kraus, M.A. ’69, served as art director of the section for 13 years. Prior to that, she did stints at Time magazine […]
Radical Slick
It was the publication that launched Gonzo journalism and helped spawn Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. Cal graduates of a certain age may recall Ramparts magazine (1962–75), the spectacular Bay Area muckraker that seemed to be everywhere at once: supporting the Civil Rights movement, exposing illicit CIA activities, challenging U.S. policy in Vietnam, and publishing the […]
Head in the Clouds
The promise of cloud computing might actually be understated For several years, cloud computing has been “the next big thing” rumbling around the IT world. Yet experts can’t even agree on how to define it. In a recent paper, computer scientist Armando Fox and his colleagues at Berkeley cleared the air about cloud computing, laying out […]
Spynning Yarns
A hand-knit sweater isn’t merely a thing of beauty, it is a tangible reminder that someone invested time and effort to provide the wearer with a beautiful gift. Now a scarf can do more than just evoke memories—it can hold them, along with images, videos, and sounds, thanks to Spyn, a system developed by School […]
Shake, Rattle, and Radar
Constantly subjected to pressure from inside the Earth, the ground we live on creeps and stretches in ways we don’t normally notice. But scientists at Berkeley’s Active Tectonics Research Group are paying attention. Using data from satellites and a technique called Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), they hope to discover key information that could reliably […]
Carbon Nation
New funding revitalizes the search for a stable method of storing carbon emissions. With a recently announced $30 million Department of Energy grant, Berkeley scientists Berend Smit and Donald DePaolo are seeking a better way to capture carbon dioxide from fossil fuel–burning power plants and store it underground for hundreds of years. The key, they say, […]
5 Questions: Serial biographer Jeffrey Meyers
Having written 43 books, including more than 20 biographies, you’re nothing if not prolific. What’s your work routine? JM: I work every day— it’s important to keep up momentum—from 9:30 to 1 in the morning and from 7:30 to 11 in the evening. In the afternoons I recharge by playing tennis (inexpensive psychotherapy), taking long […]
Out of the Gate
My first reporting job after a couple years in the Berkeley journalism program was at the Arkansas Democrat, one of two papers battling it out in the early ’80s in Little Rock. I had a lot of assumptions about Arkansas. Although I had grown up in Missouri, it’s a different world across that state line. […]
The Girl Curator
After 30 years, Renée Dreyfus welcomes the ‘Boy King’ back to the Bay Renée Dreyfus stood in a corridor of the Legion of Honor considering an ancient Egyptian idol carved from granodiorite. The figure, which held an ankh and a scepter, represented a deity, but she couldn’t say which one: It was missing its head. What […]
Going Local
The credit for one bright spot on the gloomy landscape of American journalism belongs to a recent Cal grad who arrived in the United States from China only two years ago on her first overseas trip. On the same day that Linjun Fan, M.J. ’09, received her master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism this […]
A Few Words with Neil Henry
After 16 years on the faculty of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Neil Henry was named dean in May. The seasoned reporter and professor sat down to talk with California about how the school is evolving along with the media industry itself. California magazine: I read that the students you’re admitting have an average of […]
Why Reporting Matters
I cowered in my seat as the conductor of Phantom—Las Vegas Spectacular called out my name during a cabaret show at the Liberace Museum. The fact that a Pulitzer Prize had been won in Las Vegas gave him a “new lease on life,” he said dramatically, as an audience of show-biz hams laughed at me […]
Coast to Coast
A fresh face with a great résumé takes the podium at Cal Performances. Matìas Tarnopolsky has traveled far to become the new director of Cal Performances, the university’s esteemed performing arts presenting organization. The Buenos Aires-born, London-raised administrator, who last worked as vice president of artistic planning of the New York Philharmonic, is assuming his first […]
Pawning the Jewel
Why did the average Californian meet recent threats to the UC system with silence? When State Senator Leland Yee ’70, a San Francisco Democrat, suggested last May that the state legislature and not the Board of Regents should have the final say over how the University of California system is run, there was plenty of snickering […]
Delivering Health
When Laura Stachel was a practicing OB-GYN, she could take Western medicine’s up-to-date equipment for granted. As a doctoral student in public health, she discovered physicians in Nigeria doing Caesarians by flashlight. Stachel’s medical degree was from UCSF. After 14 years in private practice, she decided to pursue an academic career in maternal and child […]
Designing Change
A $33 gizmo that plugs into your computer to keep your Coke chilled became the basis of an ingenious little refrigerator that keeps vaccines cold for 12 hours without requiring electricity. As a backup source of power, there’s a hand-crank like the one on an old-fashioned pencil sharpener. Madhvi Venkatesh, a bioengineering major and an […]
The People’s Story
“For me,” said Caricia Catalani, “public health is a way of getting at poverty.” and for Catalani, a 2008 fellow at Berkeley’s Human Rights Center who got her Ph.D. in Public Health this year, videography is a way of doing public health. In 2007, Catalani and a team that included her husband, New York director […]
Coffee to Go
Like a pickup truck parked amid a row of compact cars, the extra-long bicycle painted green, blue, and yellow calls attention to itself among the two-wheelers slotted into the bike rack in front of Wheeler Hall. This unusual campus transport belongs to Jacob Seigel-Boettner, a Peace and Conflict Studies major from Santa Barbara who will […]
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