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2024 Fall/Winter

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2006 July August Indo Chic

Image source: Photograph by Anne Dowie

Red Hot China

In her new story collection, People’s Republic of Desire, author Annie Wang follows four young women navigating a post-Tiananmen sexual revolution. Annie Wang started writing about Chinese society as a 14-year-old student journalist in Beijing, where she was born into an elite family. She has since written ten books. In 2001, she wrote her first book in […]
Image source: Courtesy of Learning Matters, Inc.

California: Dream Deferred

Liberal and conservative ballot measures, tax-cutting Republicans and union-dominated Democrats, three-strikes laws and budgetary mandates—all have played a role, often unintended, in the steep decline of California’s public schools and services. In the generation after World War II, California, always well-endowed in its climate and natural beauty, became an exemplar not only for its universities and […]
Image source: Photograph by Marcus Hanschen

City Jazz

From the new De Young museum to Oakland’s “Old Man Park,” Landscape architect Walter Hood designs through improvisation, fusing natural and social histories into a celebration of contemporary urban life. We are sitting at a café in the Glenview district of Oakland and Walter Hood is looking out the window at Park Boulevard. It is the […]
Image source: Photograph by Reagan Lowie

Passage from India

From Bollywood rap to Bangalore tech to Vishnu beer labels, California remixes Indian culture. It’s two days before I leave for India and I am shopping frantically in downtown San Francisco. My niece is 17 and I assume she needs something trendy to wear, something to give her “my-uncle-lives-in-America” cachet among her friends in Calcutta. I […]
Image source: Photograph by Michael Collopy

The Arguing Indian

The incomparable Amartya Sen on why democracy doesn’t belong to the West, the fallacy of the “moderate” Muslim, India’s atheist tradition, and other contentions. The lives of Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winner in economics and one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of our time, and Pranab Bardhan, a Berkeley economics professor who specializes in issues […]
Image source: Photograph by Hsu Pei-Hung

The Deaths and Lives of The Peony Pavilion

The 16th-century Romeo and Juliet of China is revived, with a passion. What you should know first and foremost about The Peony Pavilion, a 16th-century Chinese musical drama about love, death, and resurrection, and arguably the most famous of all kunqu operas, is that its poetry can kill. It has killed before. Passion is its currency, and […]
Image source: Photograph by O'Brian from the "Looking for Hope" Series

Rethinking Diversity

Why do so few black and Hispanic Americans become students or faculty? Blaming the absence of affirmative action snares the University in a trap, and lets state leaders off the hook. The debates about “diversity” at Berkeley and other University of California campuses often swirl around a single question: Why do so few black and Hispanic Americans […]
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