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Paul Oprescu majored in modern American history at UC Berkeley and planned to become an academic. But he had a dreamânot the kind you hold in your heart, the kind you have in your sleep. He dreamt he was making fresh pasta and selling it to students. That, he says, was the impetus that prompted […]
In 1956, the artist Jess Collins returned to the Bay Area from Europe with his partner, poet Robert Duncan. He needed money, and Berkeley cineaste-cum-seamstress, cook and part-time copywriter Pauline Kael hired him to execute a series of murals on the walls of her brown-shingled home in Berkeley. That was before all three had attained […]
Incarceration remains a growing trend in the Land of the Free. The United States, with only 5 percent of the global population, accounts for 25 percent of the worldâs prisoners, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And as a recent New Yorker article reveals, a trend toward the privatization of criminal justice has only […]
Itâs always nice to go out with a barnburner. Wrapping up a session already thick with contentious and consequential rulings from campaign finance to affirmative action, the Supreme Court ended its 2013â14 term with a bang yesterday, dropping a decision that simultaneously touches upon the issues of reproductive rights, Obamacare, freedom of religion, and the […]
Pertussis continues to spread in California, with 3,458 cases reported between January 1 and June 10: In less than half a year, the toll of the sickened already has exceeded all reported cases for 2013. State health officials have now declared a pertussis epidemicâdeeply worrisome, considering the bacterium* poses a particularly dire threat to infants. […]
Happiness: So fervently sought, so elusive. But just what the hell is it? Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz expressed his take in 1962 with his book Happiness is a Warm Puppy. That declaration gained a lot of pop (and pup) cultural traction, but it hardly told the whole story. Turns out the nitty-gritty of happiness isnât […]
Keith Harper says he always wanted a career that helped his peopleâindigenous people. Harperâs dream, which he cultivated while a student at UC Berkeley, was more fully realized this week when he became the first Native American of a federally recognized tribe to earn the post of U.S. Ambassador. This week, he begins his new […]
Lowly Superior Court rulings rarely make national news headlines. Then again, Superior Court rulings rarely mash so many political hot buttons at once. Consider then yesterdayâs mercury-raising ruling out of Los Angeles Countyâsimultaneously touching on union power, public school reform, and the constitutional rights of the stateâs childrenâand itâs no wonder that the decision already […]
Africa has its share of environmental problems, and the Nile River is a prima facie case in point. The longest river in the world, its basin supports about 300 million people. The demands on the Nile and its major tributaries are extremeâfor urban water supplies, for agriculture, for hydropower and fisheriesâand they are growing. And […]
In an age of Tinder and Match.com, of TV romance carnivals such as The Bachelor, Judith Gottesman is a proud anachronismâan old-fashioned matchmaker in a new age. Her business, Soul Mates Unlimited, concentrates on matches for Jewish singles all over California, including many in their golden years. âDonât think because they are 75, 85 or […]
As the drought drags on and reservoir levels keep dropping, our politicians predictably are clamoring for new dams. But there may be a better and cheaper way to squeeze more water out of Californiaâs desiccated watersheds: Clean out the gunk behind existing reservoirs. Thatâs because dams collect sediment from eroding watersheds along with water. Our […]
Racks of gowns, manikins, and sewing machines crowd the edges of Cari Borjaâs design studio, but a huge dining table occupies the center. Itâs where she holds the dinners that resemble the fieldwork of an anthropologist outside the Ivory Tower. For a series of 52 mealsâ44 already servedâshe has transformed her studio into a salon […]
Dan Werthimer thinks his testimony last week before the House Subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology went pretty well. As director of the SETI Research Center at Berkeley, Werthimer updated committee members on the search for extraterrestrial life, and provided a generally upbeat evaluation: ET microbial life likely is ubiquitous throughout the galaxy, and new technologies […]
When a band of student protesters booed and heckled UC President Janet Napolitano at Laney College over the weekendâto the point where graduates could barely hear herâshe became but the latest in a series of invited speakers whoâve suddenly found themselves in the thick of guerilla war over commencement addresses. At Laney, a community college […]
It all started 43 years ago. Doug Leen was working as a seasonal ranger at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, and his supervisor told him to clean out a complex of outbuildings south of Jenny Lake. Leen began hauling junk out of a barn when he saw it hanging from a nail: an old […]
A war of wordsâand, indeed, over the future of wordsâis raging across the Bay Area. On one side is a contingent of UC Berkeley academics and writers who have just formed the Authors Alliance, an organization they say will advocate for reforming an impossibly complex warren of copyright law in the digital age. At Wednesday’s […]
Marcus Lehmann is at work alongside a 50-meter-long water tank in a high-ceilinged engineering lab at UC Berkeleyâs OâBrien Hall, surrounded by wrenches, tape, wires, electronics, pipes, lab notebooks and other flotsam and jetsam. Within the tank, he generates ocean-like waves to test a promising invention: a carpet-like device that captures wave energy. It holds […]
Tamara KeithâNational Public Radioâs new White House correspondentâtold graduating philosophy majors that when she received her UC Berkeley degree in philosophy 15 years ago, her dream job was to cover presidential campaigns for MTV. âBut,â she quipped, âcovering the White House for NPR would have been a very close second.â As the departmentâs distinguished alumni […]
Itâs not enough that the drought is toasting our lawns to an unlovely shade of umber, turning our forests into tinder and threatening our salmon runs with extinction; now we have to worry about it causing earthquakes. Well, only obliquely, and only to a small degree. Itâs not so much that the lack of rain […]
