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Whether you’re a witch in need of a new familiar or a suburban family looking for a fluffy friend, one of the best ways to get a cat is to adopt, either from your local shelter or a rescue organization. But unfortunately, as UC Berkeley animal behaviorist Mikel Delgado says, a lot of people find […]
At the 2014 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Manveer Heir gave a speech that could be seen as an indictment of the videogame world—not only for misogyny and racism, but also homophobia. A gameplay designer at BioWare, he had analyzed characters in the top 25 games from 2013. “In exactly zero of these games […]
The UC Berkeley administration announced today that it will not rescind an invitation to comedian Bill Maher to address students at the winter graduation ceremony on December 20, overriding a decision by the student group involved in selecting Maher last August. “The Californians,” a student group currently comprised of 16 members, reversed an earlier decision […]
Note: Just days after this article appeared, Brittany Maynard carried out her plan to end her life in her Oregon home, surrounded by those she loved. In a final message, she said that the happiest people are those who “pause to appreciate life and give thanks.” She left behind a foundation advocating legal changes so […]
People tend to be wary of replacing humans with robots—but what if robots could be deployed as mechanical helpers in the fight against Ebola? The disease, which is an epidemic in West Africa and has made isolated appearances in a few other countries including the United States, is hard to catch but often deadly. Because […]
There’s no getting around the veracity of Matthew 26:11. “…For ye have the poor always with you,” as the King James Version has it. But as long as there has been poverty, there have also been decent souls trying to eliminate it. So how are they doing? Not very well. According to the World Food […]
Like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, John Oliver has made a career of deconstructing the news into its absurdist bits and serving it back up as a steaming hash liberally sauced with irony and outrage. Plus, because his Sunday show, “Last Week Tonight,” is broadcast on HBO, he gets to say the “F word” a […]
The horrors of the Holocaust have inspired countless films, but award-winning documentary filmmaker Ann Meredith thought she had something unique to offer. She wanted to tell not just the stories of the millions of Jews who were killed, but also those of the lesser-known victims of the Nazi death camps, including Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners […]
Once a year, UC Berkeley alumnus Peter Van Houten continues his now-decade-long tradition of leading a campus tour while portraying some of his favorite campus figures. An avid Cal history buff who received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from the university, Van Houten has always enjoyed performing and doing skits. So after recalling that […]
First off, let’s admit it: Comic books are fun. And that may explain America’s resistance to comics as a “serious” art form. Our national temper includes a Puritanical thread that looks askance at anything that might be fun. Then again it could have been the lingering effects of the anti-comics crusade led by psychiatrist Fredric […]
New York City or West Oakland? That was the choice facing young sculptor Bruce Beasley after his graduation from UC Berkeley in 1962. New York City was, as now, the epicenter of the art world, bursting with energy and promise, and teeming with young, aspiring artists from around the world. West Oakland, on the other […]
With global warming, drought and the shrinkage of American farmland, will there be enough food to feed the world? It’s a question with which experts are consumed—and should be. “Millions of people are going to die from climate change,” says Kathryn De Master, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of agriculture, society and the environment. And […]
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl has been portrayed as a Cassandra, but these days he merely seems prescient. The UC Berkeley engineering professor was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the new Bay Bridge design. The self-supported span was inappropriate for a seismically active area, he said, insisting that what was needed was a more […]
In the pantheon of fad diet crazes, perhaps the most enduring is the grapefruit diet—over the years it has inspired countless overweight Americans to guzzle grapefruits and their bitter juice in hopes of shedding pounds. But although fad diets are typically synonymous with dubious science, new UC Berkeley research suggests the grapefruit diet might actually […]
On a quiet, ordinary residential block in West Berkeley, amid boxy bungalows with manicured yards, there is a house that defies description. It’s known as the Fish House, but it looks more like a many-nostrilled beetle, or a sea slug with an underbite, or perhaps something Gaudí would have designed had he been a set […]
October 1 marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Following Jack Weinberg’s arrest for political and free speech tabling on campus–Jack’s the famous Guy in the Police Car–some 3,000 students surrounded the police car that had driven onto Sproul Plaza. Mario Savio and other student activists mounted and […]
A task force commissioned nine months ago by UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks to improve the poor academic performance of many of Cal’s student-athletes presented its findings and recommendations at a press conference last Friday. The Chancellor’s Task Force on Academics and Athletics was created in January after an NCAA report revealed abysmally low graduation […]
Organized labor may be on life support, but fast food workers have kept it from flatlining. The labor battle has been taken to the lowest common denominator—the minimum wage—and it’s there that it’s finally regaining some traction. Strikes organized by the ad hoc organization Fast Food Forward and funded by the Service Employees International Union […]
The King Fire continues to rage. As of this writing, it has scorched 87,000 acres of Sierra forest and burned down at least 10 homes and 22 outbuildings. The fire also menaced Berkeley’s Blodgett Forest Research Station, the site of a seminal study on fuel-reduction treatments. “It got within a mile, and then the wind […]
