2009 Fall Constant Change
Learning to Serve
That Cal students intend to change the world is no secret. How much they achieve while still in school is perhaps less well known. Usually 80 percent of students say they’ve volunteered in some capacity or another while they’ve been at Cal,” said Megan Voorhees, director of the Cal Corps Public Service Center. Whether it’s […]
From the Brains of Babes
Alison Gopnik on the infant mind and what it teaches us In her latest book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Berkeley psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik explores our growing understanding of cognitive processes in infants and explains how the capacity of a baby’s brain to […]
Saharan Scenes
A turn through the land of the Moors. Outside our windows the desert is silent, malevolently hot, and virtually empty. Every so often, though, we see things: knots of camels grazing the scrubland; hulks of cars left for dead by the roadside, their skeletons filling with sand; wraithlike men engaged in the Sisyphean task of sweeping […]
Not Rushing Anymore
On the sidelines with Russell White. Russell White ’93, the all-time leading rusher in Cal football history, sat alone on a Friday afternoon late last fall, watching from the bleachers as Castlemont High kicked off against East Oakland rival Skyline. At the time, White was nominally a Castlemont coach, but as an “assistant offensive coordinator” he […]
Work in Progress
In terms of demographics, funding, architecture, student culture, politics, you name it, Berkeley keeps changing. For a quick dose of Cal cultural vertigo, imagine this: A modern Rip Van Winkle wakes, dumbfounded from a 40-year sleep in a hidden nook next to Strawberry Creek. The last thing he recalls was a fog of National Guard tear […]
Nature’s Laboratory
Researchers in Moorea are inventorying the island’s ecosystem, one organism at a time. It was not storm or shipwreck or conquest that brought the first Europeans to the South Pacific island of Moorea—it was science. In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook and his ship Endeavor were dispatched to the Society Islands to observe the 1769 transit of […]
The (Really) Big Picture
Is examining the past, from the big bang to the present, a legitimate scholarly endeavor? Walter Alvarez thinks so. When we begin to appreciate the idea of rocks as recorders of the truly ancient history of the Earth and start to learn what happened in that history, we experience a dizzying but exhilarating expansion of our […]
Weathering The Storm
The forecast for newspapers may be grim, but J-schools look to a brighter future. As each week brings new reports of layoffs, buyouts, and bankruptcies across the print spectrum, the only thing clear is that an era in American journalism is ending. Graduate journalism programs, charged with training the next generation of professionals for a vocation […]
The New Believers
A surprising number of Asian students are drawn to the supportive structure of evangelical congregations. Christian rock music blasts through the open doors of the Student Union as hundreds of Asian-American undergrads clamber up the stairs to a packed Pauley Ballroom. It’s the annual New Student Welcome Night hosted by three campus ministries run by Gracepoint […]
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