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When her parents were in their 80s, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen took them to a therapist because, she says, “they seemed not to be enjoying each other.” One problem was that her father, Eli Tannen, loved reminiscing about his childhood as part of a large extended family in the Hasidic Jewish community of Warsaw, Poland. By […]
Ever since Bay Area school districts announced they would begin the fall 2020 school year with distance learning due to the still-increasing rate of COVID-19 infection across the region, parents have been scrambling to figure out how to manage their children’s schooling. One solution many are considering is “pandemic pods,” small learning groups organized by […]
In May 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented a program called Rapid DNA testing—subjecting families crossing the Mexican border to cheek swab tests, which produce extensive DNA profiles in less than two hours that are entered into a national criminal database. The initial pilot program, begun this summer, was ostensibly rolled out to […]
On November 18, 2019, Dominique Walker and Sameerah Karim moved with their children into an unlocked, vacant house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland. They had been housing insecure for months, moving from place to place, often in hotels which one of the Moms, Misty Cross, described as “Very unsafe for young girls, which I […]
In mid-April, the United Nations Secretary-General formally identified a parallel “pandemic” to COVID-19: a “misinfo-demic” or false news about the virus. Conspiracy theories, dangerous fake health advice, and discrimination and stigma related to the virus—from its origin to how it can be prevented or cured—have all spread like wildfire. The World Health Organization even added […]
From the beginning, it was an ambitious idea. Computer automation would remove the taint of human emotion or prejudice from everyday life. Algorithms—the series of instructions that tell computers what to do—would make important decisions about everything from hiring to health care. The reality, as Ziad Obermeyer discovered, is not quite that simple. The associate […]
Almost two decades after graduating, a group of 2002 UC Berkeley alums received an email from their old music professor. Would they like to get together again—at least, virtually—to create a video that might give people comfort during the pandemic? Nineteen of them responded with an enthusiastic “yes!” It was April, and Marika Kuzma, professor […]
Look up! While you were stirring up a tweetstorm on your phone, real (non)human drama was unfolding among the original tweeters—that’s right, the birds. Cooper’s hawks are in hot pursuit of pigeons through the Berkeley canopy. A consortium of bushtits gather on the sidewalk, and a black phoebe lands pensively on your fence post. An […]
Ray Durham, a law student at UC Berkeley, had a decision to make: break the law and risk his life, or abandon a protest about proving that it matters. On June 1, amid unprecedented Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Bay Area following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, Alameda County announced an 8 p.m. […]
In June 2019, University of California Police Department officers arrived at a playground near the UC Village, a campus housing complex for students with children and families. The officers had been called by two boys, both African American, who reported that an unfamiliar woman had been taking pictures of them. When officers arrived, according to […]
Throughout her childhood in Oakland, California, Bettye Kearse was told that she was descended from President James Madison and his slave, Coreen. “Always remember,” her family told her, “you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.” In 1990, when Kearse, a pediatrician and graduate of UC Berkeley, became the family griotte—or storyteller, […]
On Saturday, a crowd of about three thousand met at Grove Park in South Berkeley to march down Martin Luther King Jr. Way to Berkeley Police headquarters and City Hall. The march, organized by UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union (BSU), was one of several concurrent demonstrations in Berkeley protesting police brutality and systemic racism, following […]
I arrived at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1980 set on earning my PhD in astrophysics, and left five years later with an English degree and a burning passion for writing and reporting. What happened? John Bishop happened. One brilliant teacher, kind and absurdly generous, lit an internal flare inside of me that illuminated […]
As protests have swept the nation in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the call to defund and abolish the police has also swept social media and marched its way into the national dialogue. The conversation—centered around reducing the number of police and shifting resources to investments in education, housing, mental […]
As the death toll for COVID-19 crosses 100,000 people in the United States—the highest number of any country in the world—African Americans continue to be disproportionately impacted by the virus. Nationally, African Americans are nearly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as would be expected based on their share of the population according to […]
In January of 2014, a woman in her 80s, who sometimes used a cane to walk, stood on a platform hundreds of feet up in the canopy of a Costa Rican forest, getting ready to leap into the sky. “Nobody thought it was a good idea,” says Darek DeFreece, who was president of the Cal […]
UC Berkeley’s spring semester has been anything but normal. On March 13, the university announced that the remainder of the semester would take place online because of the coronavirus outbreak. This was not the first time that alternative instruction has been necessary at Cal. Just last fall, after PG&E shut down power to campus due […]
Rebecca Alturk would have graduated from UC Berkeley in May. As she crossed the stage to retrieve her diploma, cheered on by her mother and 6-year-old son, she might have reflected on her childhood living in motel rooms between evictions, or her rocky start at Cal, trying to balance raising an infant with a full […]
