2017 Spring Virtue and Vice
Shane Bauer Puts the Teeth Back Into Undercover Reporting
Seven hours before Shane Bauer was to start his 6 a.m. shift at the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, his wife shook him awake. “Something’s wrong,” she said. His colleague from the magazine Mother Jones, James West, hadn’t returned from shooting nighttime footage of the private prison where Bauer worked. Had officials there discovered […]
Finding His Tribe: The Art of Charles Gatewood
I couldn’t decide what made me feel dirtier—looking at hundreds of pictures of naked girls, or rifling through the personal belongings of a man I’d never met. But I was doing both one evening in the Bancroft Library reading room, traversing the late photographer Charles Gatewood’s massive archive chronicling the kink, tattoo, and body modification […]
Editor’s Note
After the first of January, the real holiday season for canines starts—that week when discarded Christmas trees are laid next to compost bins, and all the neighborhood dogs take turns anointing them in their own special way. The distinct value that we extrapolate from an idea or a thing—in this case, a formerly decorative tree […]
Berkeley Engineers Catch Waves for Clean Energy
If you’ve ever been knocked over by a breaking wave, you’ve felt the ocean’s power, but did you ever imagine it could be turned into electricity? According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), waves, tidal currents, and thermal gradients along American coastlines could potentially generate some 2,640 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year. That’s more than […]
Plant Fast Food: Berkeley Researchers Turbocharge Photosynthesis
UC Berkeley plant scientists, working with colleagues from the University of Illinois, have successfully supercharged the photosynthesis cycle, allowing genetically altered tobacco plants to grow as much as 20 percent larger simply by using more sunlight. The promise of this groundbreaking research is by no means limited to tobacco. Researchers expect their techniques to translate […]
Hitting Pause: Researchers Debunk the Global Warming Hiatus
A recent study by Berkeley researchers and the nonprofit Berkeley Earth has confirmed something most of us thought we already knew; namely, that the globe has been growing steadily warmer in recent decades. Published in Science Advances in January, the study supported earlier findings by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing that there […]
Your Brain on Drugs: Five Questions for David Presti
More than 550 Berkeley students take your course Drugs and the Brain every year. What do you hope your students take away from the class? Respect for the power of drugs, and specifically that all drugs are poisons as well as medicines. This is embedded in the ancient Greek word pharmakon. The origin of our […]
Our House: Chaos and Creation in the Berkeley Student Cooperative
In the Winter of 1979, the residents of Barrington Hall built a stage on the ground floor of their home, opposite the entrance to the dining room. With only about eight feet between the linoleum floor and the concrete ceiling, the stage couldn’t be taller than seven or eight inches. But it was tall enough—upon […]
Horns, Haloes, and Heroism: The Science of Doing the Right Thing
Yesenia Guitron knew something was wrong at the bank branch where she worked. She was getting complaints from customers—many from Mexico and undocumented—that they were being charged for accounts they had never opened and were receiving debit cards they had never requested. Guitron, a personal banker at a local Wells Fargo in the Napa Valley […]
The Peace Corps: What Could Be More Berkeley?
In 1961, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States was heating up, relations between Cuba and the U.S. were cold, and soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as America’s youngest president, he asked Congress to fund a new Peace Corps. The Peace Corps had its inception in a campaign speech Kennedy […]
A Galaxy Far, Far Away
Life after Berkeley. “You can always eat more, but you can’t eat less.” My boyfriend Mark (whose name has been changed to protect the embarrassed) was reading the back wrapper of a marijuana-infused peanut butter cookie we’d just purchased from a Berkeley dispensary. “What does that mean?” he asked. “I think it’s a caution to […]
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