2011 Spring Articles of Faith
Friendraising
The Cal Alumni Association’s fundraising team tried just about every technique this past year—Facebook, telemarketing, email, direct mail…. At the same time, the reorganized and reinvigorated development staff took the novel approach of returning to the earliest method: going out and talking with people. The combination saw strong results, even in financially troubled times. The […]
High Energy Physicist
CAA’s 2011 Alumnus of the Year, Steven Chu. A few Old Blues may harrumph, in a civil sort of way, upon learning that Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, the Cal Alumni Association’s 2011 Alumnus of the Year, is not only the current U.S. Secretary of Energy, the recent director of the Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, […]
Unearthing California
Berkeley researchers are uncovering how the land looked when the Spaniards stumbled upon it. In October 1769, the first group of Spaniards to explore Northern California by land passed through Santa Cruz. They were searching for Monterey Bay but, misled by the hyperbole of Spanish sailors, hadn’t recognized the bay even as they stood on its […]
Time Flies
Frequent-flyer hamsters help us reevaluate the effects of jet lag. Many of us are familiar with the symptoms of jet lag: sluggishness, forgetfulness, irritability, maybe an upset stomach. But after a few days, we assume that our bodies return to normal. New research by associate professor Lance Kriegsfeld and graduate student Erin Gibson suggests that perhaps […]
Reconstructing Tradition
A Cal alumna shares her family’s recipes with the world. You could say that Rosetta Costantino was ahead of her time. She was just two weeks shy of her 14th birthday when she arrived in the Bay Area with her parents, who were farmers lured by the prospect of a better life from an impoverished corner […]
Get Thee to a Nonery
As atheism loses its stigma, more students identify as nonbelievers. For those of a certain age, Sproul Plaza today seems like an analog locale on Bizarro World, the cube-shaped planet from the Superman comics where everything is backwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, Sproul was a hotbed of social activism. And to an extent, […]
Killing the Serpent
The satiric visions of Robert and Warrington Colescott. The painter Robert Colescott, who died in 2009 at age 83, is often remembered as the first African American to earn a solo exhibit in the Venice Biennale—a milestone not reached, incredibly, until 1997. In truth, Colescott was of Creole stock, mixed in race and culture. His parents, […]
Child’s Play!
Preschoolers use statistics to understand others. As part of Professor Fei Xu’s recent psychology research, preschoolers played a game with Squirrel the hand puppet, in which they tried to determine his favorite toy. Would he pick blue flowers or red circles out of the box? Sounds simple enough, and for these toddlers, it may have been […]
Now Hear This
The brain is often depicted as a map divided into distinct “states,” each responsible for various cognitive functions—the language center, the taste center, and so on. Yet Berkeley graduate student Adeen Flinker’s new research on the auditory cortex could change our fundamental understanding of these regions by dismantling the long-held concept of autonomous sensory centers […]
No Longer a Loser
Before the costumed antics, Oski was a cartoon. When Warrington Colescott was an art editor at The Daily Californian in 1941, fellow student William C. Rockwell ’48 came to him with a request that would change Cal spirit forever. Rockwell wanted to create a silly-looking school mascot based on some of Colescott’s newspaper cartoons to replace the […]
One Percent
It’s a rainy Saturday night, and I’m huddled in a doorway, pleasantly buzzed after a few drinks with a beautiful Russian girl I will never see again. The sky is wet iron, tinged with bronze from the reflected light of San Francisco. Rain patters the concrete and nips at the hem of my jeans. The […]
A Barrel of Odds and Ends
In the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the juices swap around. A few nations are composed all of town, and a few all of country, but most contain elements of both. In Trinidad and Tobago, the two-island republic in the southernmost Caribbean, the division is neat: for city you go to Trinidad, for country to […]
Chasing the Divine
Huston Smith and the seekers of Trabuco Canyon Huston Smith was at Berkeley working on his Ph.D. in 1945 when he stumbled upon the work of Gerald Heard, a British writer and philosopher—a man who would later be called “the grandfather of the New Age movement.” Smith, who would later write The World’s Religions, a book […]
Casting about for Your Vote
Death panels. Maybe you flinched when you heard it. Or fought the thought of moving to Canada. Or maybe the expression made perfect sense to you—”Obamacare” was going way too far. One thing is for sure: Whatever your stance, the phrase tapped into strong feelings. Can two words really hijack a national debate, sweep through […]
Being Big Ed
A portrait of the artist as an aging NFL lineman On mornings he can’t sleep, Ed White will brew up a pot of coffee, wander out to his studio, and paint through sunrise. Insomnia or no insomnia, he’s out there at least three days a week. He compares painting to digging. “You dig and you dig […]
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