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The best time to be a Cal football fan is the long, languid dog-days of summer. Memories from last season have healed, the first hopeful reports from training camp have started trickling in, and technically we haven’t yet been eliminated from Rose Bowl contention. In fact, we’re tied for first place! It’s a wondrous time. […]
We have discovered the fountain of youth. No pills, no shots, no yoga, no prayers. We’re simply giving one-hour talks in high schools—Peter on World War I, John on U.S. taxation. The talks have been warmly received by students and teachers, and are enormous fun for us. Most remarkably, we’ve stopped aging. So we thought […]
Decades of wear and tear haven’t been kind to the 2,713 wax cylinders in UC Berkeley’s Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, which linguists and anthropologists have used for over a century to study the languages and cultural practices of Native California. But a new project promises to revitalize these old, fragile recordings — the first […]
A team of Cal students is setting out to demonstrate one possible solution to the Bay Area’s gentrification and escalating housing costs: Go tiny. By next fall, the group plans to finish building a net-zero energy, approximately 250-square-foot home-on-wheels at UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station, a 152-acre plot that the university plans to eventually transform […]
There were a few days when I forgot my hearing aids, and senior citizens are the first to wither in classrooms built when Berkeley summer temperatures were pleasant, but I didn’t miss a day of the three Cal courses I have audited in as many years. Who wants to give up on learning? It’s a […]
Almost lost amid the recent flurry of marquee U.S. Supreme Court rulings—including one endorsing same-sex marriage and another upholding Obamacare—was a judicial move that could have a huge impact on who gets into top colleges. The justices, by opting to reconsider a case that challenges the University of Texas’s use of race and ethnicity to […]
Hours ago, craigslist posted an online ad seeking housemates for a space that does not promote “ableism, consumerism, negativism, positivism, homophonia, slut shaming or sham slutting.” Applicants need only forego TV, microwaves, doors, and all scented products (yes, foods included, people!)—and they must be non-speciesist in their welcoming of fellow tenant Gaia, the 8-foot-long monitor […]
Today, 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the scars are still tender; they linger on the New Orleans cityscape and in the hearts and minds of residents. There are several reasons why the Gulf Coast hasn’t healed, but the short attention span of human beings is the main one. After Katrina, the money and volunteers poured […]
As the 2015 enrollment data shows, the real UC Berkeley is an extremely diverse place. But UC Berkeley as depicted on television? Not so much. TV Land has been slow to surrender its use of Berkeley as code for Birkenstock-wearing, bean-sprout-loving, radical feminist tree-huggers. Only a few shows are acknowledging the contemporary reality of an institution […]
Frank Warren still gets a lot of mail from strangers. The postcards in his mailbox keep coming from different zip codes, but none have a return address. They are confessions: of infidelity, of depression, of embarrassing habits. And they are all anonymous. It started in 2004. Warren, who earned a social sciences degree from UC […]
Your Facebook feed has probably already told you this, but the public response to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s decision to feature a woman on a redesigned $10 bill has been overwhelming—he says the Treasury has received nearly a million and a half comments and tweets about it. Not everyone is happy, particularly those who […]
If you fly over parts of Tsavo today—and I challenge anyone to do so, if you have the eyes for it – you can see lines of snares set out in funnel traps that extend four or five miles. Tens of thousands of animals are being killed annually for the meat business. Carnivores are being […]
The inaugural edition of The Berkeley Barb hit streets on Friday, August 13, 1965—incendiary times. It was the first days of the Watts riots, and the conflict in Vietnam was beginning to play out in living rooms on the nightly news. That week TV viewers watched as American GIs casually torched Vietnamese villages with their […]
It seems as if every time a women opens her mouth, she runs the risk of antagonizing the vocal police. If her voice is too high, she fails to convey authority. If she aims low and engages in “vocal fry”—that creaky-voiced dip in tone at the end of a sentence—she’s contributing to what Slate’s Lexicon […]
In the 3.5 billion-year history of life on planet Earth, a century seems barely mentionable and a decade seems insignificant—but the new revelation of a project involving a Russian billionaire, three UC Berkeley researchers and $100 million just may have laid the groundwork for this decade’s shot at eternal distinction. Last week, tech billionaire Yuri […]
Ever since the inception of our species, humans have wanted to peer inside each other’s minds. A major reason we want to do this is because we lie. We lie a lot, and on the whole, we are quite good at it. The capacity for deception is possibly one of the most significant cognitive gifts […]
When Kai Haswell graduated from UC Berkeley in May, he found himself in a predicament shared by many new lawyers. After three years of backbreaking studying and tens of thousands of dollars spent on tuition fees, he couldn’t find a job. Haswell knew what he was passionate about—employment discrimination—but the Bay Area is saturated with […]
It was already their final semester at UC Berkeley, but Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez had never met. Both were sitting in a business ethics class when something the professor said caught their interest: It might be possible to grow gourmet mushrooms from used coffee grounds. Just a few weeks later, the two were practically best friends, brought together by an idea.
The waters in and around San Francisco Bay are replete with shipwrecks—200 at least. But they’re exceedingly difficult to find, says James Allan, one of the nation’s leading maritime archeologists. He is determined to bring their secrets up from the depths. Allan cites two primary factors that made these submerged vessels so elusive: The Gold […]
