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In his recently released book, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, journalist and visiting International Studies scholar Michael Zielenziger recounts the fall of Japan from the world’s second-wealthiest country into a morass of economic and social troubles. Zielenziger documents the plight of more than a million young men who shut […]
It may be all in our minds. On a cold wet day in 1997 I stood beside a retired fisherman on the end of a long wooden pier in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where, since 1623, fishermen had departed and returned with the north Atlantic bounty in the holds of their vessels. In its time, Gloucester was among […]
Can a new type of “gated community” reverse China’s ecological debacle? When I asked one of my chinese hosts to give me a tour of his city’s best new housing project, I never imagined it would inspire a Berkeley team to propose revolutionizing how the Chinese develop their new communities. We set out from the Urban […]
While visiting Beijing this past spring, I found myself gazing up at the city’s impressive high-rise landscape one morning and suddenly realizing that I had seen neither the sun nor the sky since arriving. The natural tendency is to explain such a vanishing act as due to inclement weather or some other unique atmospheric condition. […]
By studying alpine lilies and sunflowers, Berkeley scientist John Harte has uncovered a serious flaw in climate change predictions. In the end, after all the talk and worry and wringing of hands, if nothing is done it will look like this: In the Sierra, the snowpack will begin to melt earlier in the year, by March or […]
Scientists are racing to determine a “tipping point” of catastrophic climate change—and to develop technologies to prevent it. In the seething, barely perceptible world that Inez Fung’s mind inhabits these days, tropical storms pinwheel raggedly out of the Caribbean Basin. Raging grassland wildfires tumble across the intermountain west. Shrinking glaciers at the very top and bottom […]
