Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter, The Cal Connection.
Say what you will about the melodrama of The West Wing, the boorishness of Veep, or the unabashed venality on display in House of Cards, at least the politics of TV fiction are entertaining. Such is usually not the case in real life. When last we tuned into Berkeley, it was to report that the […]
What Berkeleyite has not heard them, hooting and gibbering at twilight across the East Bay hills? As the romance novelists might say, it sent a frisson down your spine, made you somehow feel that you were an early hominid on the African veldt, vulnerable to large and toothy predators. But soon Berkeleyâs spotted hyenas, and […]
No, the new Wikipedian-in-chief does not write or edit entries on the worldâs biggest collaborative encyclopedia. (If she did she would probably fix the reference to her own birthdate, which has been flagged âbetter source needed.â) âI am not an editor,â said UC Berkeley grad Lila Tretikov at a recent meeting where she was introduced […]
Some early New Orleans jazz trumpeters performed with a handkerchief draped over their fingers, to prevent anyone from stealing their hottest licks. Other musicians more generously shared their hard-won knowledge, but for most of the musicâs history, aspiring jazz players picked up information wherever they could, observing more experienced players at work on the bandstand […]
Peter Chernin loved his time as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The media mogulâwho served as president and chief operating officer of News Corp for more than a decade, and now owns his own media, technology and entertainment groupâhas attributed his success in part to the English degree he earned in 1974: To be a […]
Things were looking bleak for the UC Berkeley Human Powered Vehicle Team last weekend, and the timing couldnât have been worse. The team, all engineering majors, were on the verge of their big competition: the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Human Powered Vehicle Competition West, in Santa Clara. Rider Andrew Taylor had just started his […]
Things were looking bleak for the UC Berkeley Human Powered Vehicle Team last weekend, and the timing couldnât have been worse. The team, all engineering majors, were on the verge of their big competition: the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Human Powered Vehicle Competition West, in Santa Clara. Rider Andrew Taylor had just started his […]
Michael Lin liked playing with Legos as a kid. In fact, he couldnât get enough of the strangely compelling little plastic building blocks. Literally. âMy family wasnât wealthy, so I never had as many as I wanted,â Lin recalls. âBut I was fascinated with them, with their possibilities.â He wasnâtâor isnâtâalone, of course. The toys […]
It was an early fall day when the gates of San Quentin State Prison clanged shut behind the unusual team of consultants on its way to meet the equally unusual team of clients. âI was apprehensive,â admits Laura Tilghman, an MBA student at UC Berkeley who had never stepped into a prison before. âIt was […]
The impact of 9-11 hit Marin resident and Cal alumna Heidi Kuhn hardâbut while her initial reaction was widely shared, her subsequent response was exceptional. Four years earlier she and her husband, Gary, also a UC Berkeley graduate, had founded Roots of Peace, an organization that combines land mine removal with sustainable agriculture. After the […]
Meteorologist and environmental journalist Eric Holthaus made international news last fall when he announced to his then-13,000 Twitter followers that the latest (and dire) reports from the International Panel on Climate Change made him do two things: vow to forego flying, and sob. âI just broke down in tears in (the) boarding area at SFO […]
For avid watchers of the political saga known as Keystone, itâs another cliffhanger. Last Friday, the U.S. State Department announced it would kick the can on deciding whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, blowing past its prior May deadline and ensuring that the project will endure as a partisan talking point until well […]
Perhaps you think that you shall never see a poem as lovely as the genome sequence of the loblolly pine treeâwhich, as you undoubtedly knew, happens to be the longest genome yet sequenced. But the folks at the Joint Genome Institute are great believers in the loveliness of poetry, hailing it as “an underutilized method […]
When 29-year-old UC Berkeley student Ophir Bruck spotted Sherry Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, on her way to a University of California Regents meeting, he was holding on to a key that he hoped she wouldnât refuse. âWeâre here to call on the UC Regents to take bold action on climate change,â Bruck […]
Edward Frenkel is becoming quite the celebrity. The UC Berkeley math professor has traded jibes with bloviating faux right-winger Stephen Colbert on TV, his book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality was named one of 2013âs best books by both Amazon and iBooks, and his guest columns have been all over what remains of print […]
An estimated 2.5 billion people on the planet live on less than $2 a day. Is it possible to give the younger ones a high-quality private education? One company says yes. Bridge International Academies, a for-profit franchise of private schools founded in 2007 in Kenya, is trying to transform âknowledge for allâ into a cost-effective […]
Update: A memorial service for Earl Robinson, who died on Independence Day from complications of congestive heart failure, was held last Friday, July 25, at the site he selected before his death: the Cal Alumni House. The attendees, numbering in the hundreds, used up all the available seats and standing room, finally spilling out onto the […]
Update: Well, you can’t win ’em all. The Cal Concrete Canoe team finished fourth at the Mid-Pacific Regional Competition at Cal State Fresno on April 5, behind third place finisher Sacramento State; second place finisher Tongji University from Shanghai, China; and the Golden Bears’ arch-rivals, the University of Nevada-Reno Wolfpack. The fourth place finish means […]
No one likes to see good food go to waste. Countless times weâve been told to clean our plates or go without dessert, to equate âwaste notâ with âwant not,â to “think of the starving children residing in some far away and unfortunate country.” Food waste represents not only money poorly spent and greenhouse gas […]
