2013 Spring Growing Up
A Moment’s Grace
To call it a birthday party would be a bit of a stretch. It was my 22nd—not a particularly celebration-worthy year to begin with. I also didn’t have any friends with whom to celebrate. I was only a couple months into what would be a year-long stint as an intern at The Bakersfield Californian, and […]
A Man of Many Parts
Best known for biochemical research, Alumnus of the Year Frank Davis has turned his hand to a variety of tasks. The wide reach of Frank Davis’s achievements and travels pretty much necessitates a search engine, and he tends to punctuate his sentences with the smiling exhortation, “You could look it up!” Davis, like some hero from […]
A Squirrelly Proposal
Tonight’s dinner could be scampering right in front of you. The students will soon come back from summer break—and the hungry campus squirrels will be lying in wait… It’s perfectly sane and reasonable to kill and eat a squirrel. Really, when you think about it, the question isn’t “why am I out here stalking squirrels in […]
The Empty Quarter
The vast, bucolic, north end of California is often overlooked. Some years ago, a major metro newspaper ran a series of articles on the “many Californias”—the socially and economically diverse states-within-the-state that conjoin, however uneasily, to create one of the most dynamic societies on the planet. The conceit was not inaccurate, even if it broke along […]
To Forgive and Forget
A son confronts his birth and his mother’s death. Having a parent with Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia can be a painfully long and sad way to say good-bye. It also reaffirms the adage about laughing to keep from crying. After my mother’s memory became seriously impaired, my older sister and I never knew […]
Climbing the Spiral Staircase
A son reflects on the home his parents made and the legacy they left behind. My parents met in 1941 as editors at the University of California Press. To my mother’s annoyance, the press manager assigned my father a desk in her small office. The new hire—a mountain climber, tall, unpolished—irritated her not just by his […]
The Kids Are Alright
A conversation with childhood historian Paula Fass If you’re reading this, you were once a child. We won’t all become parents, or get married, or live to a ripe old age, but we’ve all experienced childhood. And yet, for all its universality, it is by no means a fixed idea or immutable reality. Our very notions […]
Rock-a-Bye Baby
Coming to grips with the nature of nurture I knew parenting would be trouble even before it began. Back when my wife, Beth, and I were just starting to think about having a child of our own, I asked my dad about baby sleep arrangements. Dad’s a psychotherapist specializing in the ways that early childhood experience […]
Song of Herself
Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on her Berkeley roots, parenting, and the writing life. Ursula K. Le Guin has said that her father, Alfred Kroeber, studied real cultures, while she made them up. Indeed, many of the writer’s most celebrated novels are set in intricately imagined realms, from the sci-fi universe of Ekumen to the fantasy […]
The Unretiring Chancellor
Robert Birgeneau looks ahead to teaching, research, and redesigning the public university. During his nine years in the job, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau oversaw a successful capital campaign, orchestrated a $320 million stadium renovation, stabilized the University’s budget, and implemented a plan for giving tuition breaks to middle-class students. His accomplishments occurred during what he describes as […]
In a Bind
Berkeley alumni are a prolific bunch. They all have something to say, and many are moved to put it in writing. What is unusual is to not only publish your own book but to print it yourself, bind it by hand, and cart it to the bookstores on your own. Add in that the author/publisher has a day job at Google, and we think you'll agree that Matt Werner '07 is unusual even for a Berkeley grad. We caught up with Matt via email to ask him a few questions about why, and how, he released his book—Oakland in Popular Memory, a collection of interviews with Oakland artists—the hard way.
Locked Up
Last fall, shortly before citizens voted down Proposition 34, the ballot measure that would have repealed the death penalty, preliminary findings from a new Berkeley research group revealed that more than 200 individuals have been wrongfully convicted in California since 1989—including three inmates on death row. The group, called the California Wrongful Convictions Project, is […]
Antiquity Goes Online
The Department of Classics launches an open-access journal. With the 2013 launch of an online classics monograph series, the study of the ancient world is now a little more digital—and democratic. Classics professor Donald Mastronarde and an editorial board of scholars started the website California Classical Studies, harnessing the Internet to bring research that many might […]
SIMCITY
A Berkeley professor brings urban development to life. Could visualizing the effects of local development proposals in a 3D simulation encourage citizens to become more engaged in determining how their cities and neighborhoods will grow? Denver, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City are three cities that are betting that it will. Each has recently contacted Berkeley professor […]
Time Enough
A contraption that can run forever seems like it should violate the laws of physics. But an international team of scientists, including Berkeley post doctorate Tongcang Li and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Xiang Zhang, have designed a device that can do just that: It’s a space-time crystal that will keep time forever. Technically speaking, the […]
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