2010 Spring Searchlight on Gray Areas
The World According to Errol Morris
An interrogation of the director of “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure” Errol Morris studied philosophy at Cal. He was on the doctoral track, but left in 1975 before receiving his Ph.D. It wasn’t a happy parting. Years later, in a New Yorker profile, he said he had wanted to write his thesis on […]
Strange Renderings: The Secret Geographies of UC Berkeley’s Trevor Paglen
The light is fading on a bitter-cold December afternoon in Berkeley, and Trevor Paglen is talking about spy satellites. Specifically, he’s explaining how hard it is to photograph them—not just because our government doesn’t want us to know they’re there but also because they’re a long way away. “You’re basically trying to shoot something the […]
More Than a Feeling
How strongly we empathize and how stressed out we get are hereditary traits, according to new research from Berkeley. The study, conducted by a team of psychologists and neurobiologists, has pinpointed three genetic variations that affect how well our bodies use oxytocin, the hormone and neurotransmitter that controls how swept up we get in a […]
A Cracked Slate
In search of Rube Goldberg’s Barodik I tapped my pencil on the wooden desk, waiting in the Bancroft Library’s elegant Reading Room for my materials to arrive. After a few moments, the documents were brought up from storage deep in the building’s belly. I had requested a small collection; seven faded red boxes tied with ribbon, […]
Behind The Great Firewall
To the Chinese, freedom of speech isn’t really the issue. They have closed off Tiananmen Square. The huge portrait of Mao stares across an empty Square at the giant mausoleum to the south where the Chairman’s body is usually on display. Officially the Square has been blocked off because the President of Malaysia is visiting. But […]
The Tenure Tracts
Academics try to sift truth from subterfuge in the blogosphere Online, J. Bradford DeLong is, first and foremost, a liberal muckraker. His blog thrives when there is plenty of right-wing muck. Subtlety is not DeLong’s style, one reason other bloggers love to riff on his posts. As GOP resistance to Obama’s bills heated up, DeLong found […]
Upward Mobility
Joan Jeanrenaud has forged a second career as a composer. As Joan Jeanrenaud carefully wends her way down the ramp leading from Mills College’s recently restored music building, she wields the cane in her right hand with casual precision. Though multiple sclerosis has mostly curtailed the cellist’s globe trotting ways, Jeanrenaud’s sonic explorations have multiplied exponentially even […]
The Berkeley Rebellion
Mario Savio’s design for a Free Speech Movement monument Berkeley students today take for granted that the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a major event whose memory the University commemorates. They can get a snack at the Free Speech Movement Café (opened in 2000) while viewing photos, leaflets, and other artifacts of the Berkeley rebellion. They […]
Truth in the Machine
Three Berkeley men converged to create the lie detector The others had filed out, leaving the suspect and the prosecutor alone in the room. Decasto Earl Mayer, suspected of murdering James Bassett, was ready to cop a deal. For eight hours a day, five days straight, Mayer had been strapped to a newfangled machine called a […]
The Edge of Paradise
The beauty of the Philippines is apparent to the tourist, but some of its greatest pleasures are reserved for the traveler. It is another day at the community swimming pool, an Olympic-sized facility dug into the living rock and filled by the partial diversion of a mountain stream. All around us is the jungle—mahogany and narra, […]
Cyber Stone Age
An archaeologist uses virtual reality to revive the past. A born storyteller, Berkeley archaeologist Ruth Tringham used to produce puppet shows when she was six. Now she uses the Internet as a stage to re-create the worlds she’s excavated—most recently, the 9,000-year-old Neolithic village in Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Not content with publishing her work in academic journals […]
Straightening the Path
Whitney Laughlin, Ed.D. ’93, has spent her life wandering in search of her tribe. An avowed indigenous rights activist, Laughlin is founder of College Horizons and Graduate Horizons, which organize conferences to help Native American students prepare for college and graduate school. Taking a break from one such conference at Berkeley in July 2009, the […]
5 Questions For:
Author and former CIA operative Robert Baer RB: At its core Iran is a rational state. Every action it takes is well calculated, and rarely does emotion figure in. If, for instance, Iran were to induce Israel or the United States to strike its nuclear facilities, the decision would be made on a pure calculation of […]
Just a Fluke
Engineering a solution to China’s public health problems In the 1990s, Professor Robert Spear of Berkeley’s School of Public Health first witnessed China’s struggle to eradicate an infectious parasite known as a blood fluke. Chinese health officials focused on curing the resulting disease but failed to eradicate the blood fluke. Spear concluded that medical treatment alone […]
Bang-Up Job
Astronomers spot a new type of stellar explosion. Last December, scientists announced the discovery of one of the biggest explosions ever observed: An extremely massive star blew apart more than a billion light years away, spewing radioactive nickel and glowing with a luminosity about 30 billion times that of our Sun. The team, which included researchers […]
The Heroes’ Hero
Alumnus of the Year Richard Goldman made it his mission to reward environmentalists. Environmental philanthropist Richard N. Goldman ’41 has saved many, many places on this earth, but perhaps the most unusual is an old Burger King at the Presidio of San Francisco, the former Army base at the north end of the city. Boarded up […]
The Price of Excellence
Can Cal afford athletics? On October 7, 2006, one of the largest and rowdiest crowds in Cal football history showed up at Memorial Stadium to watch then-16th-ranked Cal play the 11th-ranked, undefeated Oregon. It was the biggest home game of the year, for a team with a ton of preseason hype and legitimate national title aspirations. […]
Smells Like Aggression
Researchers re-create chemicals that cause ants to attack each other California residents are no doubt familiar with those little dark-brown ants that flood indoors when it rains and during droughts, scavenging for crumbs or whatever moisture they can glean from kitchen sinks and countertops. These are Argentine ants, a highly invasive pest that is disrupting California’s […]
Out of the Gate: All the President’s REMs
There was no doubt that working at The Daily Californian prepared a young newspaper reporter to get to the bottom of things. Anyone who could sit through a meeting of the Academic Senate and remain reasonably conscious was surely ready to dredge the depths of human activity. Turned loose on the real world in the mid-1970s, […]
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