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Search Results for “node/Glen Martin”

Students Sink Their Teeth Into the Search for a Meat Alternative

That Wagyu porterhouse makes any carnivore salivate, but tasty as many people find it, there’s no doubt that meat exacts a price both on human health and the environment.  A number of studies confirm links between red meat consumption and disease, including extensive research in Britain and Germany concluding that vegetarians are 40 percent less […]

Greetings From Atascadero: A Reporter Confronts His Facebook Foes

This is the third installment in our series, Greetings from California, in which intrepid writers file dispatches exploring the untrodden, unappreciated, or just unusual corners of the Golden State. Last year, frequent contributor Glen Martin faced the ghosts of his past when he returned to his hometown of Atascadero, California. (Check out previous letters including […]

Toward a Common Wealth

If you’ve been paying attention to the economic news you’ve probably noticed pundits using an ecological metaphor: Green shoots are sprouting. It’s a nice image. First the blackened earth of economic collapse, then tender leaves of recovery pushing up from below. If they said instead that we were seeing the early signs of infection, that wouldn’t work so well. Economic growth is never portrayed as the vine that strangles, the multiplication of locusts—it’s always the heroic sprout. The metaphor must jibe with an assumption so fundamental that few stop to consider it: Growth is good.

Stalking a Killer

Will Jay Keasling’s team of synthetic biologists and Bill and Melinda Gates’s foundation find a low-cost treatment for one of the world’s deadliest diseases? Jay Keasling carries a picture in his mind of a place he has never seen, of children he has never met. But it is an image that radically changed how he felt […]

The Skinny on School Lunches

How to get kids to eat their vegetables. Elementary students in the Berkeley Unified School District have some strange eating habits. No Pop-Tarts, no cheese-flavored Doritos, not even those little doughnuts with the powdered sugar. They prefer weeditos—their own version of burritos. At recess, the kids run to the garden—all 16 of the schools in the […]

Children run around Bayer Farm / courtesy of Craig Anderson

LandPaths Takes a Road Less Traveled to Community Building

LandPaths is a highly successful Sonoma County conservancy-cum-outreach program that fills a variety of needs: maintaining and restoring open space reserves, connecting kids and families to the outdoors through hikes, camp outs and paddle trips, and supporting summer camps and colloquia. Though the group sponsors trips to the Sierra, the main emphasis is on the […]

The View from the Trenches

By Glen Martin and Photos by Marcus Hanschen

Two years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 continues to defy predictions. At the date of this writing, the Omicron variant—as contagious as ultra-transmissible viruses such as measles, if somewhat less severe than earlier COVID variants—continues to spread rapidly. While the surge appears to be ebbing in some areas of the United States, hospitalizations remain high and, nationally, about 2,500 deaths are reported daily. 

To Hell and Back: A Paradise Educator Reckons with the Fire

That day started out as any other for Ambrosia Krinsky. She woke up in her Chico home, dropped her four-year-old off at day-care, then drove up The Skyway, the road that connects Chico to the smaller city of Paradise. Even before she got into town, she knew something was amiss: The sky was turning red. […]

Valley Fever

The Bay Area titans of tech are having a rough week, at least in the press. While news organizations reported on the billions of dollars in taxes that Apple has allegedly avoided paying by maintaining large foreign subsidiaries, the New Yorker’s George Packer pondered Silicon Valley trickle-down socio-economic theory. Indeed, Packer cites a 2011 paper […]

Cal Culture

Five Moments of Pride for Queer Cal Alumni

UC Berkeley has long been at the forefront of social movements—Free Speech, disability rights, and environmental protection, to name just a few. Cal community members have also played critical roles in pushing for equal rights, visibility, and representation for the LGBTQ+ community. Here are five moments—out of many—when Cal students, faculty, and alumni helped reach […]

The Edge Episode 8: Control-Alt-Meat

After an unsettling encounter with a turkey, Laura resolves to eat less meat and takes Leah on a journey through the alternative meat industry. Will real, flesh and blood meat be obsolete in 15 years, as one industry leader suggests?

Cal at San Francisco Pride 2018 | Image by Marcus Edwards
News

Five Moments of Pride for Queer Cal Alumni

Key moments in the advancement of equal rights, visibility, and representation for LGBTQ+ communities at Berkeley.