2012 Winter Culture Shock Archives - Cal Alumni Association

Out of the Gate

Finding Myself in the Beats My son, Danny, returned from an exchange semester at Berkeley and treated me to a recitation of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox. Robert Haas’s American Poetry class had introduced Danny to the Beats, and he wanted to know whether I had read Jack Kerouac’s On the […]

5 Questions for:

Rich Lyons, Bank of America Dean, Haas School of Business 1. After the release of this year’s Academic Rankings of World Universities, you Tweeted, “Berkeley among the top 5 university brands.” That caught my attention because the word brand wasn’t part of the rankings. Why add it? Rich Lyons: We use the word reputation a lot […]

Profound Scholarship

CAA programs help students come to Berkeley. When Jim Burk ’62 retired as the Cal Alumni Association’s executive director in 2001 after seven years at the helm, his friends honored him and his wife, Anne ’62, by creating a scholarship for The Achievement Award Program (TAAP) in their names. Along with this honor came an even […]

The Accidental Spy: In 1979, He was Both Canada’s Man in Tehran, and Ours

It was not the most provocative speech in Berkeley’s history, but Kenneth Taylor’s 1980 Charter Day address is remembered for its reception. The former Canadian ambassador to Iran had just left that post, after helping six U.S. diplomats escape the fate of 52 other Americans being held hostage by student revolutionaries. The taking of the […]

Cold Jungle

On horseback in Southern Chile. The Yosemite of Chile is located in Northern Patagonia about 60 kilometers, as the condor flies, east of the city of Puerto Montt. Its true name is El Valle de Cochamó—and that is where we were headed, four of us on horseback, riding slump-shouldered in the pouring rain. The horse I […]

Famous Enough

The minor celebrity of Rod Benson The sun hangs low over Manhattan Beach, giving the ocean a SoCal-postcard glow. Inside a fratty, nautically themed bar, Rod Benson is doing shots of vodka with his buddies. As usual, he has drawn a crowd. A fireplug-shaped guy with a tiny, feral mustache tries to impress Benson with his […]

Putin v. Pussy Riot

The trial of a punk band highlights the social troubles of post-Soviet Russia. I gathered with half a dozen local gay and lesbian activists on a mid-August evening to drink tea, munch on zakuski (snacks), and discuss the regime of creepy Russian president and former KGB thug Vladimir Putin. It was six years since I’d last […]

Mansie Remembered

By Andrew Moss

I first met Mansie Chew when a practice sheet of written Chinese characters fell out of her father's papers in the Asian-American Studies Collection at Berkeley.

Four Roads to Berkeley

Sometimes getting to Berkeley is as difficult as getting into Berkeley. The University attracts from all the world’s pathways, be they paved or unpaved, clamorous or still, open or closed—a dazzling array of brainpower hitched to goodwill. Of all the people from around the globe who study or work at Cal, or do both, we have […]

Fiat Lux Again

The University’s take on Ansel Adams’s take on the University. In 1964, Ansel Adams, the great landscape photographer, was commissioned by UC President Clark Kerr to produce a portfolio celebrating the University, its work, its people, its prospects. Kerr was casting against type. Adams, a balding, bearded, crooked-nosed man, Rabelaisian, excited by ideas, self-taught, a lapsed […]

Practice Makes Perfect

Learning a skill could improve our brains. The way to get to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice, so the saying goes. It’s an idea that resonates deeply with Allyson Mackey, a Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience, but the skills she’s interested in practicing are the building blocks of IQ, such as working memory, processing speed, […]

Out of Sight

A new drug could shed light on blindness. If the three blind mice that all ran after the farmer’s wife had consulted with Berkeley neurobiology professor Richard H. Kramer, they might have stood a chance of saving their tails. Kramer and his team of researchers at Berkeley, together with scientists from the University of Washington, Seattle […]

Democracy in Action

Controversy has surrounded the federal Endangered Species Act since its enactment in 1973. But in recent years, the debate has centered on one key provision that allows citizens including environmental groups, nonprofits, and members of the scientific community to petition for species to be listed. Critics argue the provision forces the Fish and Wildlife Service, […]

Refining Past Research

New studies add nuance to our understanding of the effect of climate change on species migration. When Toni Lyn Morelli went looking for Belding’s ground squirrels two summers ago, she didn’t think she would have much trouble. Anyone who has ever driven through Yosemite has seen the narrow-tailed, dun coated rodents standing sentinel above their holes […]