2011 Fall The Good Fight
My First Job
In 1978 I was a sixties dropout, trying to crawl back into The System at Berkeley ten years later. I was also having an affair with my graduate advisor, which wasn’t popular even then. As a result, it was politely and nonverbally communicated to me that I shouldn’t bother applying for any fancy tenure-line jobs […]
Justice—and Good Grub—For All
Berkeley alumni envision a new food system for Oakland. This spring, iconic urban homesteader and Farm City author Novella Carpenter ’07 made headlines when Oakland officials singled her out for failing to comply with urban agriculture laws. Her crime? Selling homegrown produce without a business license and growing vegetables on an empty lot without a permit. […]
Trading Luxor for Revolution
A Cal Discoveries tour to Egypt missed some historical sights, but witnessed history in the making. On January 26 of this year, a Wednesday, Bob and Charlotte Sproul arrived in Cairo along with 33 other travelers on a CAA Cal Discoveries trip to Egypt. Some unrest on the streets delayed the bus from the airport, but […]
The Free Agent
For years, Joe Kapp fought the NFL. Now he’s tackling his memoirs. Joe Kapp is finally ready to get it all down on paper—the whole thing, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Salinas to his heyday in the pros; from his first appearance in Memorial Stadium in 1956 to his return, 25 years later, as the head […]
PR Occupied Berkeley
The Israeli/Palestine conflict plays out on campus as a war for public perception.
The Eunuch Admiral
A Ming cup leads to a Berkeley scholar and the marvelous tale of China’s greatest seafarer. I first heard the Admiral’s name spoken by a corrupt police inspector in 1982. He was a local potentate in Sumatra, the Indonesian island that cuts like a scimitar through the eastern Indian Ocean, separating it from the Strait of […]
The Ecology of Conflict
Can nature thrive in a war zone? It is a counterintuitive—and in many ways, deeply disturbing—development, but something good has come out of the reign of terror by Somali pirates: fish. Tuna, wahoo, and marlin, to be precise—the big pelagic fish that are in high demand in the world’s upscale markets and restaurants. These species have […]
The Teeming Metropolis of You
Every day, a host of bacteria are at war within you. You are mostly not you. That is to say that 90 percent of the cells residing in your body are not human cells, they are microbes. Viewed from the perspective of most of its inhabitants, your body is not so much the temple and vessel […]
What Wiseman Knew
Frederick Wiseman, at work on a new film about higher ed set in Berkeley, embraces complexity to capture the way we live. A few minutes into Frederick Wiseman’s 1974 documentary Primate, the camera trails two conspicuously hirsute scientists discussing mating behavior in great apes, as they walk past the animals’ cages. Stroking their beards, the scientists […]
Shot from a Distant War
A Hemingway photo captures a single, fragile victory. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, which Ernest Hemingway covered as a newspaper correspondent. Hemingway was well paid as a correspondent—he was Ernest Hemingway, after all. His first two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms […]
Automatic Writing
The artificial intelligence behind Wikipedia If you’ve ever read through a few Wikipedia entries on U.S. cities and thought they sounded, well … robotic, you might be right. Chances are the article was written by a piece of software. Automated programs called bots have been working behind the scenes since the online public encyclopedia was born. […]
Beauty and the Pest
New research supports old-fashioned pest management. If the California vineyards are looking more vibrant than usual, it might be due to blossoming new research by Berkeley agroecologists. For more than three years, they’ve been working with grape growers in Napa, San Joaquin, and Fresno counties to plant flowers that attract pest-eating insects, as part of research […]
Hot Topic
A Berkeley physicist takes the temperature of climate change. There are plenty of reasons you might have heard of Richard Muller. The longtime Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory senior scientist has won a Macarthur Fellowship and has for many years taught Physics 10, better known as Physics for Future Presidents, publishing a popular book by that name. […]
Novel Approach
The post-political career of a White House spin doctor Nicolle Wallace, President George W. Bush’s communications director and a top campaign advisor to Senator John McCain, doesn’t fit the public perception of a Republican operative. The stunning 37-year-old with a girl-next-door face framed by parentheses of blond hair is a graceful feminist with empathy for […]
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