2010 Summer Shelf Life
Driving Change
The City Streets Project wants to change the way we design urban environments. Picture yourself strolling down a city street. Fellow pedestrians bustle among shops and offices, while a steady stream of bicyclists flows between you and the distant car traffic. Sunlight dapples the broad sidewalk of the tree-lined blocks ahead, and flowers bloom brilliantly in […]
Natural Affinities
By Kenneth BrowerIn my mid-teens, when I first showed an interest in writing, my mother would occasionally recommend two novels by George R. Stewart, an old English professor of hers at Cal. One was called Fire and the other
Poetic Gesture
A California crown for Lord Byron. One late July day in 1870, two poets boarded a side-wheel ferry at Meiggs Wharf in San Francisco. The Princess plowed six miles across the mouth of the bay to what was then the village of “Saucelito,” at that time just a few piers and a building or two at […]
Pressing Business
The University of California Press supports its mission of publishing good scholarship. The media today—newspapers, books, and, yes, magazines—are in a bewildering situation. People are getting information in new ways, methods of production and distribution are shifting. Writers and editors routinely deploy terms like “business model” and “social media.” None of that is necessarily bad. It’s […]
An Independent Existence
Recalling Harriet Lane Levy’s unusual, eclectic life. The news of a neighbor’s betrothal was not greeted with joy in the household of Benjamin and Yetta Levy. Far from it. “No sooner had an engagement been announced…than a shadow fell upon the house for the day,” their youngest daughter recalled in her memoir of growing up in […]
Extraordinarily Ordinary: Beverly Cleary Still Making Magic for Young Readers
You won’t find a vampire in a Beverly Cleary book. There are no zombies, witches, warlocks, or wizards in the world inhabited by Ramona and Beezus Quimby, Ellen Tebbits, Henry Huggins, Henry’s dog Ribsy, or any of the fictional gang on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon. Hardcore drug use and teenage pregnancy are not addressed, […]
Intellectual Action Hero
The political fictions of Eugene Burdick. The Berkeley “Teach-in,” held over the course of one cold, windy weekend in May 1965, helped set the template for countless Vietnam protests to come. The 33-hour marathon drew senators and journalists and activists, mimes and comedians and folk singers, all of whom railed against American involvement in Southeast Asia. […]
No Laughing Matter
Berkeley’s hyenas may help unravel the mystery of language Some evenings in the Berkeley Hills, an unexpected sound can be heard among the usual chirps of the wrens and the chickadees: the piercing giggles of laughing hyenas, a species native to southern Africa. A colony of these creatures live in the Berkeley Field Station for the […]
Damage Control
Chile’s disaster tells experts what California is doing right – and wrong – to prepare for the next big one. In 1985, Jack Moehle, Professor of Civil and Envirnomental Engineering at Berkeley, traveled to Chile to sort through the rubble left in the wake of the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked the coast. He was […]
Fast Learner
Cal grad student Carol Greider got started early making monumental discoveries in cell biology Several suitcases were open in Carol Greider’s Baltimore living room on a misty day in December 2009. The new recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was just back from Stockholm, where she had partied hard with her two young […]
Art Star
With the addition of the Fisher Collection, SF MOMA becomes a world destination. Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was nursing an afternoon espresso in the museum’s rooftop atrium and looking very content. A large, delicate swarm of spiders, Louise Bourgeois’s The Nest, loomed nearby. Between […]
Central Asia’s Soviet Hangover
Stalin’s fading, but the ghost of Lenin lingers on. In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyztan, a statue of Lenin has been moved from its prominent perch in front of Parliament around back, to a plaza built atop a bomb shelter dating from the 1950s. In Ashgabat, the surreal capital of oil-rich Turkmenistan, a statue of Lenin […]
Forgotten Sports Heroes of Cal
Archie Williams ’39 Archie Williams, an athlete, airman, and teacher who ran in the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin, graduated from Cal with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at a time when no one in the field was hiring African-Americans. A native of Oakland, Williams was a track star at University High School and […]
Bound to Sell
How two Berkeley bookstores fought, and still fight, for their values In the twilight hours of a February morning in 1989, Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue was firebombed. Pressure was on for Andy Ross, Cody’s owner, to remove from the shelves Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Satanic Verses, which satirizes parts of Islamic culture. A few […]
License at the Margins
Jonathan Lethem talks about becoming a writer in Berkeley In 1984, novelist Jonathan Lethem dropped out of Bennington and headed west to Berkeley, where he spent a decade working in two of the city’s iconic bookshops: Pegasus and Moe’s. Today, the celebrated author is back in his native New York, but it was in Berkeley, he […]
Foggy Future
A sharp drop in marine fog may threaten California’s state tree. Just as Southern California is famous for sunny beaches, the north coast is epitomized by fog-enshrouded redwood forests. Now, new research suggests that this fog has declined drastically, threatening these iconic trees. “Fog and redwoods are linked,” says James Johnstone, M.A. ’02, Ph.D. ’08, lead […]
An Ounce of Prevention
Sometimes the public health field is a victim of its own success. In the Spring of 2001, several leading public health associations launched an ambitious effort to raise the profile of their field. Creating the Public Health Brand Identity Coalition–which I think we can all agree is not the sexiest name for an initiative to promote […]
Tale of a Mid-Sixties Swim Babe
Twenty-eight years ago I took up swimming after I finally quit smoking for the last time. I was 39 and believed I was teetering into middle age. Up until that point, I rather scorned athletics and sports as bourgeois. After Berkeley, I’d gone to New York, where the only exercise I got in was running […]
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