2018 Fall Culture Shift
Child’s Play: Are Apps Collecting Your Children’s Data?
Beneath Irwin Reyes’s desk are ten smartphones hooked up to a computer, running a dizzying number of apps to find out what user information those apps send back to their creators. Reyes and his fellow Berkeley researchers at the Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) recently used the phones to survey thousands of free Android […]
Why Are Animals Becoming More Nocturnal?
Research out of UC Berkeley shows that animals around the world are becoming more nocturnal in response to human populations. The study, published in the journal Science in June, found that mammals have, on average, become 1.36 times more active at night. In other words, a creature that normally would have split its activities equally […]
He Left El Salvador as a Boy. He Returned Home a Poet.
Javier Zamora, a Salvadoran-American poet who lived for most of his life sin papeles, doesn’t care too much for labels. Or borders for that matter. Born in El Salvador and educated at UC Berkeley, Zamora immigrated to the U.S. when he was only 9 years old. Since then, his literary success has earned him new […]
Chancellor’s Letter: Listening to Women’s Voices
In the fall of 2017, the #MeToo movement drew national headlines that focused the country’s attention on the issue of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. The poignant narratives courageously shared as part of #MeToo make sexual harassment feel viscerally real, even to people who may think they have largely been spared from its […]
Rude Awakening: A Rocky First Semester at Cal
The following chapter “Biography” has been excerpted from I WILL BE COMPLETE: A MEMOIR (2018) by Glen David Gold. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. I FOUND A ROOM IN A HOUSE in north Berkeley, on Mariposa, a one-block street where the trees had been planted a […]
Why Do Veterans Drop Out of Higher Ed?
1. You quote a veteran in your book, Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus, who says of his civilian classmates, “…none of the people in this room gave a shit about what I thought was important.” What are some of those important things valued in the military but not on […]
Trick or Tracksuit
An expat’s Halloween faux pas
Diversity, Not Drama: Q&A With UC Davis’s Chancellor Gary May
Gary S. May became the seventh chancellor of University of California, Davis last year—and the first African-American chancellor in the school’s history. May, who received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley in 1991, had served as the dean of the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology prior […]
Editor’s Note: We’re on the Road to…Somewhere
When I was a kid, it seemed like all adults smoked. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalks, the stench of stale tobacco clung to the upholstery, and ashtrays were everywhere. We made ashtrays in art class as gifts for our parents. Back then, people smoked in their offices, their cars, and on airplanes. On airplanes! In […]
Meet Metal-Organic Frameworks, Chemistry’s New Miracle Materials
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a revolutionary new class of crystalline solids that can be designed to trap myriad kinds of matter, including greenhouse gases, or to be used as nanosized drug carriers. They can also pull water from desert air. A chief characteristic of MOFs, which some have been called “miracle materials,” is how much […]
Rewriting History, Making Herstory
By June of this year, the #MeToo movement had been bumped from both headlines and headspace by weird, convulsive, and disorienting stories—families separated at the border, trade wars erupting, regressive Supreme Court decisions, and intense and distracting hand-wringing over restaurant owners and patrons making mealtime awkward for members of the Trump administration. As early wildfires […]
Smile! You’re On Candid Camera Phone
It was many years ago, when I worked in a large city and I often had to walk several blocks from one large office complex to another during the course of the average work day. One afternoon I was trudging between buildings, head bent, lost in thought; I passed the entrance to a small, dark […]
Politically Homeless: Q&A With Columnist Max Boot
CALIFORNIA Magazine: In the prologue of your new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, you say you are now “perceiving ugly truths about America and about conservatism that other people had long seen but I turned a blind eye to.” What are some of those ugly truths? Max Boot: As an […]
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