2008 July August Summer Sports Issue
Passing the Baton
It’s not their mom and dad’s NCAA. Sports at Berkeley is as old as the school itself—it began in 1868 with the men’s crew team, followed in 1882 by men’s rugby. Browse through images of Cal sports and you’ll find all the lovely and endearing artifacts—the male students of 1879 exercising in the newly opened Harmon […]
Ambassador of Style
Youssou N’Dour continues to introduce new rhythms to world music. Youssou N’Dour conquered the world in the 1980s with his African fusion music. Now the Senegalese pop superstar is returning his attention to his ethnically diverse homeland, exploring some more of West Africa’s overlooked grooves. The singer is the master of the infectious style known as […]
A Scanner Smartly
Researchers are learning how to “read” your visual cortex Imagine a machine that can tell from your brain activity alone, what images you’ve just seen. It sounds like something straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel. It actually comes straight out of Berkeley’s psychology department. In an experiment described this March in Nature two subjects […]
Dirt Simple
The surprising health benefits of floors In 2004 economics and public health professor Paul Gertler was invited by the Mexican government to study a program called Piso Firme, or “firm floor,” a deceptively simple public health initiative in which families were given an average of $150 worth of wet cement for domestic flooring. To measure the […]
Don’t Walk, Run!
When marked crosswalks send pedestrians the wrong signal. A crosswalk might appear to be the safest route across a busy, multi-lane street, but research conducted by the Federal Highway Administration shows that pedestrians are almost five times more likely to be struck in a painted crosswalk than at an unmarked crossing. In an attempt to explain […]
Tracking a Killer
On the trail of Sudden Oak Death Phytophthora ramorum is a silent killer that burrows through the bark of its victim to feed on the nutrient-rich cambium. Californians may recognize P. ramorum as the pathogen responsible for Sudden Oak Death, the forest disease that has spread to 14 coastal counties and killed more than 1 million […]
Going for Broke
Why we risk more when we lose When Haas School of Business professor Eduardo Andrade and his wife-to-be were planning their first trip to Las Vegas, she insisted they hold themselves to a budget. So Andrade was surprised when the usually pragmatic woman, having quickly lost her allotment, abandoned her plan and continued gambling. Intrigued, he […]
Terrible Lizards, Better Birds
How birds are helping scientists understand dinosaurs As you probably know by now, dinosaurs didn’t really go extinct—they evolved into birds. The paradigm-shifting moment came in 1964 when Yale paleontologist John Ostrom found a dinosaur fossil that reminded him more of a modern raptor than it did a lizard. The discovery led Ostrom to conclude that […]
Wolves in a Dogfight
Seven years ago, campus was rocked by this headline in The Daily Californian: “Stanford Forfeits Cal Rugby Game.” It was all explained in an email from Stanford coach Franck Boivert to Cal’s Jack Clark ’79, saying that while Stanford’s players weren’t afraid of losing to Cal (as they had for 19 out of 20 matches […]
Maz Jobrani
Wisecracks in the war on terror. A few days before the Iranian New Year, comedian Maz Jobrani takes to a San Francisco stage, casual in dark jeans and a black blazer. The largely Iranian crowd explodes with laughter as the bald, goateed Jobrani jokes about battling airport security over his cologne—a favored item among Iranian men. […]
Good News Bears?
There are more questions than answers about the Blue and Gold’s upcoming season, which isn’t to say it will be a bad one. It could even be better than last year’s, during which the team earned an invitation to the Armed Forces Bowl by finishing 6–6, yet lost all but one of their last seven […]
Choosing to be Chosen
Religious leaders gather to challenge notions of “Who is a Jew?” Rabbi Capers Funnye, the spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, doesn’t look Jewish—at least to some Jewish eyes. “When someone comes into a synagogue, the last thing you’re supposed to ask them is ‘Are you Jewish?’ Well, if I’m […]
Planet of the Hominids
In Ethiopia, Timothy White and his colleagues have found some of our nearest relatives, and powerful evidence that we all come from Africa. During lunch at Chez Panisse, Tim White draws a map of places I should visit in Ethiopia, on the paper table mat. The famed professor agrees to rendezvous with me at the National […]
The Modified Man
Today’s athletes look perfect. What if they could be perfect? Nobody’s perfect. Not even Tim McNeill. A three-time All-American gymnast and team co-captain at Berkeley, in April McNeill won two NCAA individual championships competing at Stanford’s Maples Pavilion. He keeps up a 3.5 grade point average despite a rigorous training schedule. He’s even managed to maintain […]
GO: Jungle metropolis
Manaus, Brazil, is Sodom to some, but one exile to its banks finds a beguiling mix of European elegance and tropical funk. My first sojourn in the city of Manaus, at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, the remotest metropolis on Earth, came at the invitation of Brazil’s air force and was instigated, […]
Athletes as Aesthetes
And vice versa The rumpus was loud around the playing fields inside the cavernous San Francisco Concourse. Athletes and dancers bent and stretched, slapping each others’ backs and muttering encouragement to themselves; students in the Straw Marching Band’s array of bashed-up boaters and tattered vests bleated and blared a series of ferocious fight songs; young members […]
Explore the
Archives
View All Issues
