Berkeley Talks

The future of American democracy Nov 01, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 212, a panel of UC Berkeley experts from former presidential administrations take a critical look at the issues that have led the U.S. to this year’s historic election and reflect on the future of American democracy. The Oct. 29 campus event was sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy and Cal Performances, and was part of the Goldman School’s Interrogating Democracy series.

Panelists include:

Janet Napolitano, professor of public policy and director of the new Center for Security in Politics; former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration; former president of the University of California.
Robert Reich, emeritus professor of public policy; senior fellow at the Blum Center for Economic Development; former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.
Maria Echaveste, policy and program development director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy; former assistant to the president and deputy White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration; president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute.
Angela Glover Blackwell (moderator), chief vision officer for the Goldman School of Public Policy’s new Democracy Policy Initiative; founder-in-residence of PolicyLink.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Dyana Wing So via Unsplash.

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A return to monarchy? Bradley Onishi on Project 2025 Oct 18, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 211, Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion, an ex-evangelical minister and the co-host of the politics podcast Straight White American Jesus, discusses Project 2025, Christian nationalism and the November elections.

“Project 2025 is a deeply reactionary Catholic vision for the country,” said Onishi, who gave the 2024 Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance on Oct. 1. “It's a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic leaders, and in many cases, reactionary Catholic thought.”

Many see Trump’s vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance, a first-term senator from Ohio, as bolstering Trump’s outsider image, said Onishi. But it has gone mostly unnoticed that Vance is a radical religious politician, even more so than former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Vance's Catholicism has barely registered as a driving factor in his political profile, and yet it serves as an interpretive key for understanding why Vance was chosen and how he brings a populist radicalism to a potential second Trump presidency — and a direct link to Project 2025,” he said.

The UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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With white helmets and GoPros, these volunteers risk it all in Syria’s civil war Oct 04, 2024

In 2011, mass protests erupted in Syria against the four-decade authoritarian rule of the Assad family. The uprising, which became part of the larger pro-democracy Arab Spring that spread through much of the Arab world, was met with a brutal government crackdown.

Soon after, the country descended into a devastating civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced over 13 million people, more than half of the country’s prewar population.

When the civil war broke out, groups of volunteers formed to provide emergency response to communities across Syria. In 2014, those volunteers voted to form the Syria Civil Defence, a national humanitarian organization widely known as the White Helmets. Since then, the group has expanded to become a nearly 3,000-strong network that has saved more than 128,000 lives in Syria.

In their daring and life-threatening work, the White Helmets provide critical emergency services, including medical care, ambulances and search-and-rescue operations. They also document military attacks and coordinate with NGOs in pursuit of justice and accountability for the Syrian people.

In Berkeley Talks episode 210, we hear from the director of the White Helmets, Raed al-Saleh, and from Farouq Habib, a founding member of the organization who serves as their deputy general manager for external affairs. They were part of a panel discussion hosted by Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center on Sept. 19, 2024.

“For us, as Syrian people, the most strategic and important work is on justice and accountability, our human rights work,” said al-Saleh, whose remarks were translated by Habib during the event.

The group has become instrumental in exposing human rights violations and atrocities during the war. After they used GoPro cameras to record a double-tap strike in 2015 — when two strikes are launched in quick succession, often targeting civilians or first responders — the White Helmets recognized that the videos could be used to document these war crimes.

“We realized that the footage … is not only important for media awareness and quality assurance, but it’s even more important to document the atrocities and the violations of international human rights law and how to use that in the future to pursue accountability.”

When asked later in the discussion how the White Helmets envision the future of Syria, al-Saleh replied that they want to see “a peaceful Syria, where people can live with dignity and respect to human rights and support human rights everywhere.”

Habib and al-Saleh were joined on the panel by Andrea Richardson, a senior legal researcher for investigations at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center, and emergency physician and medical adviser Rohini Haar, a Berkeley Law lecturer and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center. The discussion was moderated by Andrea Richardson, executive director of the Human Rights Center.

Learn more about Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of the White Helmets.

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Legal scholars on free speech challenges facing universities today Sep 20, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 209, renowned legal scholars Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, and Nadine Strossen, professor emerita of the New York School of Law and national president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008, discuss free speech challenges facing universities today. They covered topics including hate speech, First Amendment rights, the Heckler’s Veto, institutional neutrality and what steps universities can take to avoid free speech controversies.

The conversation, which took place on Sept. 11, was held in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in which thousands of students protested successfully for their right to free political speech at UC Berkeley. Instead of having a moderator, the speakers were given a list of questions they posed to each other, and took turns answering them.

At one illuminating moment, Chemerinsky asked Strossen what steps she might take to reduce the harmful effects of polarized political speech on campus.

“I think that punishment is not an effective way to change somebody's attitudes,” Strossen answered, “which is what we are concerned about, especially in an educational environment. Treating somebody like a criminal or even shaming, shunning and ostracizing them is not likely to open their hearts and minds. So I think it is as ineffective as a strategy for dealing with discrimination as it is unjustified and consistent with First Amendment principles.

“But there are a lot of things that universities can and should do — and I know from reading about your campus, that you are doing … It's gotten justified nationwide attention.”

Strossen went on to emphasize the importance of education, not only in free speech principles, but in other civic principles, as well, like the history of discrimination and anti-Semitism.

Beyond education, Strossen said, “universities have to show support for members of the community who are the targets of hateful speech by raising their own voices, but also by providing psychological and other counseling and material kinds of support.”

The event was sponsored by HxA Berkeley and Voices for Liberty, of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School. It was co-sponsored by Berkeley Law’s Public Law and Policy program, the Berkeley Liberty Initiative and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Screenshot of HxA Berkeley video.

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What is understanding? Berkeley scholars discuss Sep 06, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 208, three UC Berkeley professors from a wide range of disciplines — psychology, biology and ethnic studies — broach a deep question: What is understanding?

“When I think about it through the lens of being a psychologist, I really think about understanding as a demonstration of, say, knowledge that we have about the world,” begins Arianne Eason, an assistant professor of psychology, in this episode.

“But that knowledge doesn't necessarily have to be through what we say. It doesn't necessarily have to be explicit. It's really about shaping the way that we engage with the world around us, and with those around us, and being very flexible.

“I think, a lot of times, if we’re thinking about the college context, and what is understanding, people's first reaction might be, ‘I'm able to give an answer.’ But that's not really understanding. It's really about being able to apply it to different contexts that you may not have seen before.

“And I think kind of wrapped up in that for me is a recognition of what you don't know. To really understand also means to recognize what you don't understand, and where the limits of your knowledge are.”

The fall 2024 discussion also included Christian Paiz, an associate professor of ethnic studies, and Hernan Garcia, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology and of physics.

It’s part of a video series for Research, Discovery and You, a course for new students offered every fall semester by Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science. In the course, students are introduced to different ways of thinking and approaches to knowledge production as practiced across the college’s 79 majors.

Research, Discovery and You is taught by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, professor of psychology and the college’s associate dean of student outreach and engagement, and Aileen Liu, the college’s director of curricular engagement initiatives.

The video series, part of the course’s recent redesign, was supported by the College of Letters and Science and the Division of Undergraduate Education’s Instructional Technology and Innovation Micro Grant Program.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Screenshot from L&S video.

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It’s not just psychedelics that change minds, says Michael Pollan. Storytelling does, too. Aug 23, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 207, bestselling author and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Pollan discusses how he chooses his subjects, why he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the role of storytelling in shifting our perspective.

“We're wired for story,” he told KQED’s Mina Kim, whom he joined in conversation at a UC Berkeley event in May 2024. “We're a storytelling and consuming people, and we remember better and we're moved more by narrative than we are by information or argument.

“The shorter journalism gets, the more it relies on argument to get any kind of heat. And I just don't think that's how you change minds. I think changing minds has to work at all levels: It has to work at the intellectual level, it has to work at the emotional level, and at even probably subliminal levels, and story does that.

“When you look at great pieces of narrative journalism, people don't even realize their minds have been changed by the time they get to the end of it.”

Pollan has written eight books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2010),about the impact of our various food choices on animal welfare and the environment, and How to Change Your Mind (2018), an exploration of the history of psychedelics and their effects on the human mind. He recently retired from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he taught for many years.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Marlena Telvick.

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The science behind the emotions in 'Inside Out 2' Aug 09, 2024

There’s a scene toward the end of the new Pixar film Inside Out 2 where the main character, 13-year-old Riley, is having a panic attack in the penalty box at a hockey match.

She’s just been reprimanded for tripping an opponent in frustration. On the outside, she’s seen sitting in the small space while grasping at her chest and neck, breathing in and out, faster and faster. On the inside, the character Anxiety, one of Riley’s newest emotions, is spinning in a glitchy loop at her brain’s control board.

After a few moments, Riley slowly begins to notice and reconnect with the world around her. Her panic subsides, her breathing steadies and she centers herself.

It’s a gripping illustration of a common (and terrifying) experience, and a reminder for teens and parents alike that there’s nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to anxiety. For experts who consulted on Inside Out 2, normalizing the emotion was part of the goal.

“You have so much pressure on young people to be perfectionistic and excel in everything,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, who consulted on how to convey and understand emotions in the film. “Panic and anxiety, those are part of our evolutionary design. They have their point. They can get excessive, of course, but just to be there and to have a language, to let the child know they're not alone, that these are common reactions, is such a powerful [message].”

In Berkeley Talks episode 206, Keltner joins a panel of others who worked on Inside Out 2 — clinical psychologist Lisa Damour,who served as a scientific consultant on the film with Keltner, and the film’s lead editor, Maurissa Horwitz. Together, they discuss the unique pressures that teenagers face, the science behind emotions, and how all of them, even the most uncomfortable, have a purpose.

“I felt like I was learning more about my adolescent self as I worked on this movie,” said Horwitz. “I think being able to really name those emotions that come up during this period … and knowing that there's that amount of growth and reworking going on physically inside [your brain], it's just a great thing to be aware of as a touchstone.”

“I'm hearing that conversations are happening in families, whether it's around anxiety or self-talk,” she continued, “and that parents and families are feeling seen by this movie and relate to it so much. It's really incredible to be a part of that.”

This July 2024 conversation was moderated by Allison Briscoe-Smith, a child clinical psychologist and a senior fellow at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, where Keltner is the faculty director.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Screenshot from Inside Out 2.

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Journalist Jemele Hill on the intersection of sports and race (revisiting) Jul 26, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 205, sports journalist Jemele Hill discusses her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. at a UC Berkeley event in January 2020.

"Sports journalism," began KALW radio journalist Hana Baba, with whom Hill joined in conversation as part of a Cal Performances speaker series. "So you’re growing up, you’re watching TV, you’re reading the papers ... When did you realize that this is a male journalist's space?

"I knew that, but I didn’t know it," replied Hill, author of the 2022 memoir Uphill and host of the podcast Jemele Hill Is Unbothered. "And this is why — whenever I talk about mentorship, I preach this to both mentees and mentors: The first thing you can give a mentee and the first responsibility as a mentor, you need to give them a sense of belonging."

She went on to describe how, when she was in an apprenticeship program for the Detroit Free Press, two women journalists — feature writer Johnette Howard and sports writer Rachel Jones — were assigned to be her mentors.

"So I never knew that it was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing because the very first person I knew that did it was a woman. ... And so because I got that early confidence at the beginning of my career, I just never went through a period of self-doubt, which is totally normal for any woman in a male-dominated space, especially a Black woman. So I was very lucky that I got that sense of belonging early."

Later on, Hill discussed when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem throughout the San Francisco 49ers’ season in 2016 to protest racial injustice, effectively ending his football career.

“I mean, the NFL owners are spineless,” said Hill, who worked for ESPN for more than a decade and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2018.

“I knew Colin Kaepernick would never play in the NFL the moment Donald Trump said his name … One of the few things that a lot of people unfortunately agree with the [former] president about is that Colin Kaepernick should not be taking a knee. So, he [Trump] knows every time he says his [Kaepernick’s] name, that it is giving him a level of universal support … that he doesn’t experience usually.

“And so what does that say about people in this country? … We just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, commemorated him. And the same people I saw talking about how great Dr. King was for his nonviolent protest are also the same people who think Colin Kaepernick doesn’t deserve to play in the NFL? … But the NFL, I think, as we have seen in the case with Muhammad Ali, as we have seen is the case with a lot of history, 20 years from now they’ll be telling a different story. They’ll act like all of this never happened.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Daniel Stark/ESPN.

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How the Supreme Court divided America Jul 12, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 204, Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, discusses the history of the Supreme Court and how its recent decisions will impact generations to come.

“When you think of the topics for the first two years of this supermajority — guns, abortion, affirmative action, the interest of the fossil fuel industry — that doesn't sound like a court,” Waldman said to UC Berkeley Law Professor Maria Echaveste, whom he joined in conversation in April 2024. “That sounds like a political caucus.

“And so, I think disentangling our reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law, which is vital to the country and deeply embedded in who we are, with the specific role of the Supreme Court, and especially this Supreme Court, is a challenge. But I think we have to find a way to do it.”

The Supreme Court issued decisions in June and July that may have historic impacts on American society, but because Waldman's talk took place before these decisions were issued, he doesn’t discuss them in this conversation.

This event was hosted by Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy as part of its new Interrogating Democracy series.

The Brennan Center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving systems of democracy and justice. Waldman is a constitutional lawyer and author of the 2023 book, The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America. He served as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021 and worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton alongside Echaveste.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks/).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Screenshot of the cover of Waldman's book, The Supermajority.

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Reconsidering Black America’s relationship to the plantation Jun 28, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 203, Alisha Gaines, a professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in African American studies at Florida State University, discusses why it’s important for Black America to “excavate and reconsider” its relationship to the plantation.

“If we were to approach the plantation with an intention to hold space for the Black people who stayed and labored there,” said Gaines at a UC Berkeley event in April, “we might see the plantation as another origin story — one of resistance, joy, love, craftsmanship and survival, and not just dehumanization and the porn of Black suffering.”

Gaines is currently at work on Children of the Plantationocene, a forthcoming book project about Black American origin stories, and is the first scholar-in-residence of Berkeley’s Banned Scholars Project. The project was launched by the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies in March 2024 in response to attacks on academic freedom across the nation.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Photo courtesy of Alisha Gaines.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Adam Gopnik on what it takes to keep liberal democracies alive Jun 14, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 202, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses liberalism — what it means, why we need it and the endless dedication it requires to maintain.

Liberal democracy, he said at a UC Berkeley event in April, depends on two pillars: free and fair elections and the practice of open institutions, places where people can meet and debate without the pressures of overt supervision.

Gopnik said these spaces of “commonplace civilization” — coffeehouses, parks, even zoos — enable democratic elections to “reform, accelerate and improve.”

“These secondary institutions … are not in themselves explicitly political at all, but provide little arenas in which we learn the habits of coexistence, mutual toleration and the difficult, but necessary, business of collaborating with those who come from vastly different backgrounds, classes, castes and creeds from ourselves.”

And what makes liberalism unique, he said, is that it requires a commitment to constant reform.

“People get exhausted by the search for perpetual reform,” he said. “But we have to be committed to reform because our circles of compassion, no matter how we try to broaden them, come to an end.”

So it’s up to each of us, he said, to always refocus our attention on the other, to re-understand and expand our circles of compassion.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Adam Gopnik.

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'Wave' memoirist on writing about unimaginable loss May 31, 2024

In 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala was on vacation with her family on the coast of Sri Lanka when a tsunami struck the South Asian island. It killed her husband, their two sons and her parents, leaving Deraniyagala alone in a reality she couldn’t comprehend.

In Berkeley Talks episode 201, Deraniyagala discusses her all-consuming grief in the aftermath of the tragedy and the process of writing about it in her 2013 memoir, Wave.

“Wave was the wave was the wave,” said Deraniyagala, who spoke in April 2024 at an event for Art of Writing, a program of UC Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. “What mattered was the loss. It could have been a tree. It just happened to be the wave. I wasn't that interested in how it happened. It was more this otherworldly situation where I had a life, I didn't have a life, and it took 10 minutes between the two.

“So that I was trying to figure out, and I think the whole book Wave was trying to. Everything you know vanishes in an instant, literally in an instant, with no warning. … I experienced something that I didn't have words for. I didn't know what was happening when it was happening, which is why I was sure I was dreaming.”

Deraniyagala, an economist who teaches at the University of London and Columbia University, described herself as "an accidental writer.” She said her initial goal, at the urging of her therapist, was to write for herself in attempt to make sense of a loss that "one can't write easily or put into sentences or find words for," she told Ramona Naddaff, Berkeley associate professor of rhetoric and founding director of Art of Writing, whom Deraniyagala joined in conversation for the event.

But in the painstaking process of writing and rewriting, Deraniyagala found her voice. And after eight years, Wave was published. It became a New York Times bestseller and won the PEN Ackerley Prize in 2013.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Emily Thompson.

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Gigi Sohn on her fight for an open internet May 28, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 200, Gigi Sohn, one of the nation’s leading public advocates for equal access to the internet, delivers the keynote address at the UC Berkeley School of Information’s 2024 commencement ceremony.

“I'd like to share with you some of the twists and turns of my professional journey as a public advocate in the world of communications and technology policy,” Sohn began at the May 18 event. … “I'm hoping that by sharing my story, you'll be inspired to keep choosing the path that you know is right for you and for society, even if it sometimes comes at a cost.”

Sohn began her story in the late 1980s, when she started a career in communications law. It was through this work, she said, that she learned the importance of media to a healthy democracy.

“Those with access to the [communications] networks influenced the debates that shaped public policy and decided elections,” Sohn said. “Those without were simply perilous. The internet promised to change all of that. … The world that advocates like me envisioned was one where everyone would have a voice and where the marketplace of ideas, and ultimately democracy, would flourish.

“But that ideal wouldn't happen by itself.”

In her speech, Sohn detailed her lifelong career as a public interest advocate, her fraught White House nominations to serve on the Federal Communications Commission and the importance of staying true to herself.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Photo by Noah Berger for UC Berkeley's School of Information.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Harry Edwards to sociology grads: Even in turbulent times, always believe in yourself May 24, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 199, Harry Edwards, a renowned sports activist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, gives the keynote address at the Department of Sociology’s 2024 commencement ceremony.

“As I stand here before you, in the twilight of my life's time of long shadows,” said Edwards at the May 13 event, “from a perspective informed by my 81 years of experience, and by a retrospective assessment of the lessons learned over my 60 years of activism, what is my advice and message to you young people today? What emerges as most critically germane and relevant in today's climate?

“First: Even in turbulent times, in the midst of all of the challenges, contradictions and confusion to be faced, never cease to believe in yourself and your capacities to realize your dreams.

“From time to time, you might have to take a different path than you had anticipated and planned, but you can still get there. Achievement of your dreams always begins with a belief in yourself. Never allow anyone to dissuade you of this imperative disposition. And if someone so much as even tries, you tell them that the good doctor said you need to go and get a second opinion.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Allena Cayce.

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Feeling like a failure isn't the same as failing, filmmaker tells journalism grads May 23, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 198, documentary filmmaker Carrie Lozano delivers the keynote address at the 2024 Berkeley Journalism commencement ceremony. Lozano, who graduated from the school of journalism in 2005 and later taught in its documentary program, is now president and CEO of ITVS, a nonprofit that coproduces independent films for PBS and produces the acclaimed series, Independent Lens.

“I've had a lot of tough moments in my career, sometimes feeling like I was not going to recover,” Lozano told the graduates at the May 11 event. “I have put energy into my process for dealing with staggering mistakes and things that don't work out.

“First, I own my mistakes. We all make mistakes and it's OK to own them and take responsibility. And it's so liberating actually to just take responsibility for them.

And then I do this: I allow myself, depending on the gravity of the situation, time to sulk or to cry, to be depressed, to be upset, to be angry, to feel all the feelings. But I am finite about it. Some things require a few hours. Some things might require a few days. Some things might require therapy. Whatever it is, I figure it out.

“And then, I just try to figure out: What did I learn? How can I make it worth it? That was so damn painful … how can I make this mean something to me? How can I do better next time? Or at least not repeat it?"

“It's super helpful to know that the feeling of failure is not the same thing as failing," she continued. "It's part of being human. It's part of growing. It's necessary. It's messy. It's life.”

Berkeley Journalism recently launched a $54.4-million campaign to support the next generation of journalists whose stories will affect democracy, justice, human rights and the health of our environment. Learn more about the Campaign for Berkeley Journalism.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Amin Muhammad.

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Berkeley commencement speeches celebrate resilience, bravery May 17, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 197, we're sharing a selection of speeches from UC Berkeley's campuswide commencement ceremony on May 11. The first speech is by Chancellor Christ, followed by ASUC President Sydney Roberts and ending with keynote speaker Cynt Marshall, a Berkeley alum and CEO of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.

"I believe the future of our democracy depends on our ability to engage in civil discourse across the divides and reject the forces of division and polarization," Christ began, as hundreds of graduates chanted in protest of the war in Gaza. "Given recent events and the scourge of COVID, I can only marvel at how you've navigated these complicated times.

"Your presence here today is a testimony to a remarkable accomplishment whose meaning and worth will serve you well in the days to come. We could not be prouder."

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small for UC Berkeley.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

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Ruth Simmons on access and equity in higher education May 03, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 196, Ruth Simmons, a longtime professor and academic administrator, discusses how the journey to equal access and fairness in education has reached a critical inflection point — and why educators are essential to the progress we need to see.

“History has shown: The failure to resolve satisfactorily the issue of whether and how the state should address the causes and effects of discrimination will continue to impair progress, sow seeds of hatred and despair, and make even more distant the goals and ideals enshrined in the United States Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution,” Simmons said during the Clark Kerr Lecture at UC Berkeley in April.

“Yet, as we know,” Simmons continued, “considerable efforts have been undertaken by various branches of government, non-profit institutions, for-profit institutions, educational institutions and activists to reconcile the immense differences over what constitutes appropriate remedies for past and present discrimination. That we have failed to resolve this question adequately almost 250 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights proves the intractability of the dilemma.”

Simmons, currently the president's distinguished fellow at Rice University, served as the eighth president of Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU, from 2017 until 2023. And from 2001 to 2012, she served as the 18th president of Brown University, where she was the first Black president of an Ivy League institution.

In closing, Simmons said: “Education makes possible the smoothing out of the unequal circumstances into which many are born. Educators are therefore on the front lines in ensuring that this democracy endures because we are optimistic enough, brave enough and wise enough to create and manage a process in which the public as a whole feels well-served by our work.

“And so our efforts to make plain where we stand in regard to evening out unequal circumstances are, in this moment, all-important. So, let's get about the work of making plain where we stand.”

This April 18 event was sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.

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The future of psychedelic science Apr 19, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 195, UC Berkeley professors discuss how and why psychedelic substances first evolved, the effects they have in the human brain and mind, and the mechanism behind their potential therapeutic role.

"If it's true that the therapeutic effects are in part because we're returning to this state of susceptibility, and vulnerability, and ability to learn from our environment similar to childhood," says psychology Professor Gül Dölen, "then if we just focus on the day of the trip and don't instead also focus our therapeutic efforts on those weeks after, where the critical period is presumably still open, then we're missing the opportunity to really integrate those insights that happen during the trip into the rest of the network of memories that are supporting those learned behaviors.

"And then the caution is that we don't want to be opening up these critical periods and then, for example, returning people to a traumatic environment or exposing them to potentially bad actors … So we want to be very careful about the way that we take care of patients after they've been in this open state of the critical period."

Panelists of this March 27, 2024 event included:

Imran Khan (moderator): Executive director of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP).
Gül Dölen: Renee & U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Bob Parsons Endowed Chair in psychology, psychedelics, and neuroscience; professor in the Department of Psychology.
Daniela Kaufer: Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; associate dean of biological sciences.
Noah Whiteman: Professor of integrative biology and of molecular and cell biology; faculty director of the Essig Museum of Entomology.
Michael Silver: Professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science and in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; faculty director of BCSP.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

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UC Berkeley photo of Daniela Kaufer.

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Sociologist Harry Edwards on sport in society (revisiting) Apr 05, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 194, Harry Edwards, a renowned sports activist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, discusses the intersections of race and sport, the history of predatory inclusion, athletes’ struggle for definitional authority and the power of sport to change society.

“You can change society by changing people’s perceptions and understandings of the games they play,” Edwards said at a March 2022 campus event sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and Cal Athletics.

“I’m saying whether it’s race relations in America, whether it’s relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, whether it’s what’s going on in South Africa with apartheid, you can leverage sport to change people’s perceptions and understandings of those relationships. Change society by changing people’s perceptions and understandings of the games they play.”

This episode is from our archive. It first ran on Berkeley Talks in April 2022.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

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Sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson on the need for 'angry optimism' Mar 22, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 193, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson discusses climate change, politics and the need for "angry optimism." Robinson is the author of 22 novels, including his most recent, The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020.

"It's a fighting position — angry optimism — and you need it," he said at a UC Berkeley event in January, in conversation with English professor Katherine Snyder and Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology and director of the Sociospatial Climate Collaborative.

"A couple of days ago, somebody talked about The Ministry for the Future being a pedagogy of hope. And I was thinking, 'Oh, that's nice.' Not just, why should you hope? Because you need to — to stay alive and all these other reasons you need hope. But also, it's strategically useful.

"And then, how to hope in the situation that we're in, which is filled with dread and filled with people fighting with wicked strength to wreck the earth and human chances in it.

"The political battle is not going to be everybody coming together and going, 'Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a problem, let's solve it.' It's more like some people saying, 'Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a problem that we have to solve,' and other people going, 'No, we don’t have a problem.'

"They'll say that right down over the cliff. They'll be falling to their death going, 'No problem here because I'm going to heaven and you're not,' or whatever. Nobody will ever admit they're wrong. They will die. And then the next generation will have a new structure of feeling.

"In the meantime, how to keep your hope going, how to put it to use … I think all novels have a little of this, and then Ministry is just more explicit."

This Jan. 24 event was sponsored by the Berkeley Climate Change Network and co-sponsored by Berkeley Journalism; Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, home to the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Read the transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

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The future of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Mar 08, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 192, Sarah Deer, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, discusses the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law passed in 1978 that aims to keep Native children in their families and communities. She also talks about the recent Supreme Court decision in Brackeen v. Haaland, which upheld ICWA, and explores the future of ICWA.

“I want to begin by just talking about why ICWA was passed, and it has to do with a very tragic history in the United States of removing children from Native homes,” said Deer, chief justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals, at a UC Berkeley event in December 2023.

“This issue really became a profound harm to Native people during the boarding school era, in which the policy of the federal government was to remove children from their Native homes and send them to boarding schools, sometimes thousands of miles away. At these boarding schools, the attempt was to civilize — so-called 'civilize' — Indian children, which was really a euphemism for destroying their identity.”

Later in the talk, she continued, “We still see a need for ICWA because we still see a higher percentage of Native children being placed in out-of-home care. There may be a variety of reasons for that, but it took over a century to damage the relationship between Native children and their communities.”

This Dec. 8 event was sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, part of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Its co-sponsors were the Center for Race and Gender; Native American Student Development; and the Native American Law Student Association.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor on fighting the good fight Feb 23, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 191, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor talks about getting up every morning ready to fight for what she believes in, how she finds ways to work with justices whose views differ wildly from her own and what she looks for in a clerk (hint: It’s not only brilliance).

“I’m in my 44th year as a law professor,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinksy, who was in discussion with Sotomayor for UC Berkeley’s annual Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture on Jan. 29. “I’m teaching constitutional law this semester. I have to say that I’ve never seen some of my students as discouraged as they are now about the Supreme Court and about the Constitution. What should I say to them?”

“What choice do you have but to fight the good fight?” Sotomayor responded. “You can’t throw up your hands and walk away. That’s not a choice. That’s abdication. That’s giving up.

“How can you look at the heroes like Thurgood Marshall, like the freedom fighters, who went to lunch counters and got beat up? To men like John Lewis, who marched over a bridge and had his head busted open? How can you look at those people and say that you’re entitled to despair? You’re not. I’m not.

“Change never happens on its own. Change happens because people care about moving the arc of the universe towards justice. And it can take time, and it can take frustration.”

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Philip Pacheco.

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Why so many recent uprisings have backfired Feb 09, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 190, journalist and UC Berkeley alumnus Vincent Bevins discusses mass protests around the world — from Egypt to Hong Kong to Brazil — and how each had a different outcome than what protesters asked for.

“From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in mass protests than at any other point in human history,” said Bevins, author of the 2023 book, If We Burn. “These protests were often experienced as a euphoric victory at the moment of the eruption. But then, after a lot of the foreign journalists, like me, have left (the countries), and we look at what actually happened, the outcome was very different than what was originally expected or indeed hoped for.”

For his book, Bevins interviewed more than 200 people in 12 countries, all of whom were a part of the uprisings, whether they put the protests together or responded to them as government officials or lived through them.

In closing, he said, “When you properly want to restructure the system or make real problems for powerful forces, the counterattack is going to come.”

And, according to thinkers from around the world Bevins spoke to, including Berkeley sociology Professor Cihan Tuğal, instead of putting together an organization during an uprising, protesters should build in the off-season.

“Build real structures that can allow human beings that want to reshape the world in the same way to act together in the moment of the uprising," said Bevins, "because it’s very difficult to put together an organization in the uprising.”

This talk, recorded in October 2023, was moderated by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at Berkeley and director of the Socio-Spacial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. The event was co-sponsored by (SC)2 and Social Science Matrix.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr.

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American democracy and the crisis of majority rule Jan 26, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 189, Harvard Professor Daniel Ziblatt discusses how Americans need to do the work of making the U.S. political system more democratic through reforms that ensure that electoral majorities can actually govern.

“If you're going to have a first-past-the-post electoral system, as we have in the United States, or one side wins and another side loses, then those with the most votes should prevail over those with fewer votes in determining who holds political office,” said Ziblatt, co-author How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. “No theory of liberal democracy can justify any other outcome. Put differently, office holding should reflect how voters vote.”

This Dec. 6, 2023 talk was presented by UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures as part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture series.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Photo by Manny Becerra via Unsplash.

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Free speech on campus in times of great division Jan 12, 2024

In Berkeley Talks episode 188, a panel of scholars discusses free speech on university campuses — where things stand today, what obligation campus leaders have to respond to conflicts involving speech and the need for students to feel safe when expressing their own views.

"Issues of free speech on campus have been there as long as there have been universities," began Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky at a UC Berkeley event on Jan. 10. "There's no doubt that since Oct. 7, universities across the country, including here at Berkeley, face enormously difficult issues with regard to freedom of speech."

"Especially in these times where, and especially with this (Israel-Hamas) war, where people are feeling so hurt by words, and arguing that words or phrases mean you're anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, it's really challenging," said Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand. "The temptation when people are so hurt and in so much pain is to run from it.

"But in fact, I think we should do the exact opposite. … At times, those are the moments where people will actually want to learn, and need to learn, and listen.

"So I think we should charge toward the conversations in these hard times, precisely because there are opportunities to learn so much. Because … when people make this demand or that demand, they're often expressing a need to be heard and a need to have a voice in what's happening."

Panelists in this discussion included:

Geeta Anand, dean of Berkeley Journalism
Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney, ACLU; adjunct professor, NYU School of Law
Howard Gillman, chancellor and professor of law, UC Irvine
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law (moderator)

This discussion is part of the Berkeley Law Conversations series. Watch a video of the conversation and learn more about the speakers on Berkeley Law’s website.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Photo by Kefr4000 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Protecting survivors of sex trafficking Dec 29, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 187, Bernice Yeung, managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program; public health journalist Isabella Gomes; and gender-based violence expert Holly Joshi discuss how sex trafficking can appear invisible if we don’t know where to look, and how doctors, nurses, police officers, hotel operators — all of us — can do more to protect victims and survivors.

“If we're just looking at sex trafficking as the issue, then it's a bipartisan issue,” said Joshi, director of the GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice in San Francisco, and a nationally recognized expert on gender-based violence prevention and intervention. “But if we're really looking at the causes and the historical oppression and the ongoing systemic oppression of women and girls and immigrants and failure to create safe cities for immigrants and anti-Blackness, all of those things equal a failure to protect survivors of sex trafficking.

“So … yes, it's a bipartisan issue if we're just talking about sex trafficking legislation, specifically. But we're not. We're really talking about American politics and the historic lockout of entire groups of people that is continuing to go on and is creating vulnerable victims in this country.”

This Nov. 8 discussion, co-presented by the Pulitzer Center and Berkeley Journalism, was part of a forum focused on gender. It also included a keynote by New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on democracy and authoritarianism in the context of gender, race and identity in the U.S.

Learn more about the speakers and watch a video of the conversation on Berkeley Journalism’s website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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The transformative potential of AI in academia Dec 15, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront.

"When it comes to human-specific problems, we often want fair, equitable, unbiased answers," said Keanan Joyner, an assistant professor of psychology. "But the data that we feed into the training set often is not that. And so, we are asking AI to produce something that it was never trained on, and that can be very problematic. We have to think very carefully about how we're training our AI models and whether they'll be useful or not. I think there's so many awesome uses of AI, and I'm going to use it in my own work, and it's going to definitely infuse psychological science and social sciences more broadly."

Panelists of the October 2023 Berkeley event included:

Alex Saum-Pascual, associate professor of contemporary Spanish literature
Keanan Joyner, assistant professor of psychology
Josh Bloom, professor of astronomy
Moderated by Marion Fourcade, professor of sociology and director of the Social Science Matrix

This discussion is part of the L&S Salon Series, which showcases the diversity and range of academic disciplines embedded across the five divisions in the College of Letters and Science.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.

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Nate Cohn on polling and the 2024 election Dec 01, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 185, New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn discusses how polling works, the challenges facing pollsters today and where polling stands as we head into the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that we have a crisis of polling at the same time we have a crisis of democracy," said Cohn, who gave UC Berkeley’s Citrin Award Lecture on Oct. 19.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump mobilized a so-called silent majority of voters who felt that they were unrepresented in our political system, and who turned out to be underrepresented in polls by an order of magnitude for decades.

"Just think about all of the choices that politicians made from the '80s onward. That in each one of those decisions, they were doing it, in part, based on data that underrepresented the number of white working class Americans by tens of millions. I think it added up, and I think I'll start by proving that to you, and I think it offers a nice launching point for where polling is today. Because although it's tempting to think the problems in polling are recent to Trump, I think it's probably fair to say that Trump exposed issues in polling that had existed for a very long time before that."

The Citrin Award Lecture is an annual event of Berkeley’s Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research. Watch a video of Cohn’s lecture on YouTube.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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AP Photo by Steve Helber.

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A blueprint for housing reform Nov 17, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 184, Richard Rothstein, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, and housing policy expert Leah Rothstein discuss their 2023 book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. The conversation was moderated by Tamika Moss, founder and CEO of the Bay Area organization, All Home.

In the book, the father-daughter co-authors describe how unconstitutional government policy on the part of federal, state and local governments created the segregation that we know in this country today, where every metropolitan area has clearly defined areas that either are all white or mostly white, and clearly defined areas that are all Black or mostly Black.

"We had a myth term that what we had in this country was 'defacto segregation,' something that just happened because of private bigotry or discriminatory actions on the part of private businesses or people just liking to live with each other of the same race ... something that just happened by accident," said Richard Rothstein, author of the 2017 book, The Color of Law, and a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow emeritus of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

"And the reason that that distinction is so important is because if it just happened by accident, then we might not like it, but it's easy to think that the only way it's going to unhappen is by accident. But when we understand that this is the creation of racially explicit written public policy on the part of federal, state and local governments ... (and) if we take our responsibilities as citizens of this country seriously, then we know we have an obligation to fix it, to undo this unconstitutional system."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

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Poulomi Saha on why we're so obsessed with cults Nov 03, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 183, Poulomi Saha, an associate professor in the Department of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, discusses how cult culture, once a fringe phenomenon, has moved into the mainstream — and what that tells us about what we long for, what we fear and who we hope to be.

"In this crisis moment, we have a return to desire for overarching meaning, radical acceptance, transformative experience, transcendence," says Saha. "But unlike in the 1960s, we're not dropping out, we're tuning in ... to a highly regularized representation of cults. If in the 1960s we had the sense that fringe groups and communes might offer us a way out of conformity and regularity, in this current incarnation, when cults appear in our everyday lives, they do so highly regularized."

Saha is currently working on a book about America’s long obsession with its own invented visions of Indian spirituality, and why so often those groups and communities come to be called cults.

(Editing note: Because of an audio issue, we left out the Q&A portion of this talk.)

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Jen Siska.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Ezra Klein on building the things we need for the future we want Oct 20, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 182, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world.

"To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need," began Klein, who joined in conversation on Oct. 5 with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

"It's so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it.

"And yet, the story of America in the 21st century, more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism, is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are getting far more of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act than blue states?"

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Lucas Foglia.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Chinese activist Ai WeiWei on art, exile and politics Oct 06, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 181, renowned artist and human rights activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile and politics in a conversation with noted theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Ai, who grew up in northwest China under harsh conditions because of his poet father's exile, is openly critical of the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights. He is well-known for his provocative works, including his 2014-15 installation on San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz Island, @Large, that the LA Times called, "an always-poignant, often-powerful meditation on soul-deadening repressions of human thought and feeling."

"Normally, people call me an artist or activist, and I am often forced into one condition," he says. "It's not that I intentionally try to create something or to crystallize something, but rather I've been put in extreme conditions, and I have to focus on dealing with those situations. Normally, I don't accept the easy answer.

"So I think I have to find a language to illustrate my expression, and it comes out in certain ideas or materials. We can call it art. I don't think my art really looks like art, but still, it's hard to categorize it. I'm a bit ashamed about it because everything in real life, it has a purpose. It has clear problems and solutions. But the art is not really about that. It rather creates problems after problems. So yeah, that's what I do."

This Sept. 24 event was co-presented by Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Read about 10 of Ai WeiWei's adventurous works on Cal Performances' blog Beyond the Stage.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu)

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Ai WeiWei.

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What are Berkeley's Latinx Thriving Initiatives? Sep 22, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 180, Dania Matos and Fabrizio Mejia, vice chancellor and associate vice chancellor, respectively, for UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, join Berkeley student Angelica Garcia to discuss the campus’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives (LTI) and how these efforts are supporting Berkeley’s goal of not only becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), but also of transforming Berkeley into a Latinx Thriving Institution.

“There's a practical standpoint of this that's about becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution,” begins Matos. “That's why you'll hear HSIs a lot, and it's important in that naming and framing. Dr. Gina Garcia is a sort of national expert who talks about this, but for us, it's really taking it beyond that. Because becoming an HSI is about 25% enrollment of undergraduate students, which, by the way, the federal government does not count graduate students, and we care about graduate students here, too.

“For us, we're thinking about (how to) build this ecosystem where we are honoring, bringing in more Latinx communities, but also honoring the different ways of knowing and being, which are so counter to the way U.S. higher educational system is done.

“Latinx Thriving Initiatives is a multifaceted campuswide effort, but not just campus. It's really thinking and honoring our mission as a public institution, and (asking), ‘How do we center community in that?’ We're not just a community center that people come to or get admitted to and leave from in four years, but a place where they're having an impact and creating that.”

“It’s collecting all the work that is happening,” added Mejia, “honoring that historical effort, that ongoing effort, but also asking ourselves, ‘What else? What does it look like to have a Latinx student body, Latinx staff, Latinx faculty that are all thriving from the moment they conceptualize “Is Berkeley a place for me?” to the moment they land on the campus and say, “Where do I see myself in this environment? How do I meet my aspirations? Am I getting the support all the way through?"’

Listen to the full conversation in Berkeley Talks episode 180, “What are Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives?”

This conversation was recorded in March 2023 as the first episode of Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives podcast, which explores what it means for Berkeley to become a Latinx Thriving Institution, and the direct impact it’ll have on its Latinx-identifying campus community. It was created in partnership with Ethnic Studies Changemaker, a campus group of students plus a faculty adviser that aims to “amplify the voices and diverse experiences of marginalized communities.”

Learn more about Berkeley’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives and watch a video of what these efforts have accomplished over the past year on the Latinx Thriving Initiatives website.

Photo by H.G. Villaseñor and I. Torres.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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Poet Ishion Hutchinson reads 'The Mud Sermon' and other poems Sep 08, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 179, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reads several poems, including "The Mud Sermon," "The Bicycle Eclogue" and "After the Hurricane." His April reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event Lunch Poems.

"I take this voyage into poetry very seriously," begins Hutchinson, "and take none of it for granted, because of the weight of history, both growing up in Jamaica and knowing the violent history that comes with that. But also the violence, too, of canon, and seeing that my work as a poet, in part, is to figure out what sort of emancipatory forces I should summon. Luckily, I stand in great shoulders within the Caribbean tradition of many poets and writers that I admire, and envy, and wish they hadn't been born. Don't tell them that. This isn't recorded, of course."

Here’s “A Mud Sermon,” one of the poems Hutchinson read during the event:

They shovelled the long trenches day and night.

Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.

Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Hun bait mud. Mating mud.

1655 mud: white flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chilblain mud.

Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha mud. Amnesia mud.

Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud.

No-man’s-land’s-Everyman’s mud. And the smoking flax mud.

Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hog pen mud. Nephritis mud.

Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud.

Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud.

Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin mud. Civil war mud.

And darkness and worms will be their dwelling-place mud.

Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.

Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud.

They resurrected new counter-kingdoms,

by the arbitrament of the sword mud.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

Lunch Poems is an ongoing poetry reading series at Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 p.m. to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month. A new season of Lunch Poems will begin on Oct. 5 with Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik in the Morrison Library.

Find upcoming talks on the Lunch Poems website and watch videos of past readings on the Lunch Poems YouTube channel.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Neil-Anthony Watson.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Michael Brown's family on keeping his memory alive Aug 25, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 178, Rashad Arman Timmons, a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, joins in conversation with the family of Michael Brown Jr., whose 2014 killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited a wave of protests across the country.

During the March 8, 2023, discussion, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., his stepmother, Cal Brown, and Timmons consider the enduring significance of Ferguson in the nation’s racial landscape and ponder Black grief as a resource for social transformation.

“A note on grief,” begins Timmons. “We grieve because we care. We grieve because we love. And we grieve because we remember. I feel a responsibility to say this, to acknowledge grief for what it truly is: an ethical act of care, a radical act of love and a persistent triumph of memory.

“When we grieve the Black dead and dying, we enact an urgent care for them. We profess a vigilant love over them and nurture a commitment to remember them. Christina Sharpe in her beautiful theorizing calls the unison of these practices ‘wake work.’ ‘Wake work,’ she writes, "describes how we attend to physical, social and figurative death, and also to the largeness that is Black life, or Black life insisted from death. Wake work describes how we imagine, defend and care for Black lives always already threatened, in our present or the future, that chattel slavery made possible.”

Read more about the event and learn more about the Black Studies Collaboratory.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Oppenheimer's Berkeley years Aug 16, 2023

In Berkeley Talks episode 177, a panel of scholars discusses theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and how his years at UC Berkeley shaped him, and how he shaped the university.

Oppenheimer, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s summer 2023 film Oppenheimer, came to Berkeley in 1929 as an assistant professor and over the next dozen years established one of the greatest schools of theoretical physics. He went on to direct the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, during which the first nuclear weapons were developed. He’s often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb.”

“Exceptional students and postdocs flocked here to Berkeley to work with him,” began Cathryn Carson, a Berkeley professor of history and a specialist in the history of 20th century physics, who moderated the July 28 discussion at Berkeley.

“As we’ll hear today,” she continued, “the style of work that Oppenheimer unfolded at Berkeley was collaborative, pointed, directed at hard problems, not always successful. His modus operandi, you could say, was, ‘Work hard, play hard.’

“He landed in the Bay at a time when much else was in ferment. At the same time that he devoted himself to physics, he got engaged with contemporary left-wing politics. In the Bay Area in the 1930s, that included the fight against fascism in Nazi Germany and Spain and struggles for economic justice and labor in California. The Communist Party was part of that setting, and Oppenheimer immersed himself in the life of the Berkeley faculty, efforts to unionize it and intellectual currents across the university — this broad liberal arts institution that fed his roving mind.”

Panelists include:

Cathryn Carson, chair and professor of Berkeley’s Department of History, whose research includes nuclear history and the history of 20th century physics. She co-edited a volume of papers about Oppenheimer, Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections.
Mark Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer for weapons physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who edited and published a suite of papers on the technical history of the Trinity test.
Jon Else, professor emeritus of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, who created the documentary The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb.
Yasunori Nomura, a Berkeley professor of physics and director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.
Karl van Bibber, professor of nuclear engineering at Berkeley, who spent 25 years conducting nuclear energy research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Jessica Morse on how we can live with fire Jul 28, 2023

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Jessica Morse, the deputy secretary for forest and wildland resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency, discusses the current wildfire crisis in California and how we got here, strategies the state is implementing, and lessons they've learned in order to decrease catastrophic wildfires and create more resilient forests.

Morse began her Nov. 4, 2022, lecture with a story about the Camp Fire, the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century that killed 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in Northern California.

"The story for me starts Nov. 8, 2018, almost four years ago to the day the campfire broke out in Paradise," began Morse. "I think all of us have some story of knowing where we were that day. It was a game-changer in terms of the deadliest, most devastating fire we've seen in California history. I went up there a couple days later to go help out and volunteer with the relief efforts. And what I saw was striking: We had 54,000 people displaced in the blink of an eye. Most of the people, even a couple days after the fire, were still meandering around in pajama bottoms and slippers because they had fled from their homes from this fire that was moving so quickly."

"It was a level of trauma in people that I had not seen firsthand since I had been in an active war zone in Iraq," she continued. "And I thought, 'This is my community. These are our neighbors. This is our state. How is this happening? And how did it get this bad? And what do we do about it?'

"And so, I dedicated then my time and energy, as well as many of you have to, trying to solve and answer that question. And so, I joined the Newsom administration. The governor on day one, he declared an emergency on these fires so that we could start investing in the prevention work. And so, that's what I'm going to tell you a lot about today, is how we've transformed and transitioned in California to the scale we're at today."

This talk was the Berkeley Rausser College of Natural Resources' 2022 S.J. Hall Lecture in Industrial Forestry.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

UC Berkeley photo by Scott Stephens.

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Siri creator Adam Cheyer shares secrets of entrepreneurship Jul 14, 2023

Siri creator Adam Cheyer talks about the long road to launching the virtual assistant, how to take an entrepreneurial idea from conception to impact and why he doesn't see anything as a failure.

"An entrepreneur and a magician are exactly the same," begins Cheyer, who also founded the startups Change.org, Viv Labs, Sentient and Bixby. "An entrepreneur needs to imagine an impossible future. Think about Siri: 20 years ago, if I told you that you could pull a device out of your pocket, it would know who you are and where you are and you could just talk to it using your words and it would not only talk back to you, but do things for you, book that reservation, buy a movie ticket, you would've thought that were magic.

"An entrepreneur has to imagine an impossible future that's desirable, that doesn't exist ... So, you have to reach far as an entrepreneur, dream big, dream magical. But you have to be very clear (and answer) 'Why would we want such a thing?'"

This Feb. 9, 2021, talk was part of UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology's 2021 Newton Lecture Series.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

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Legal scholars unpack Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action Jul 10, 2023

In this episode, three leading legal scholars — john a. powell, director of UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI); Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; and Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown Law School — discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public and private universities cannot use race as a factor in admitting students. The court, with its conservative justices in the majority, ruled that such affirmative action violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, reversing decades of legal precedent.

In California, UC Berkeley and other public colleges and universities have been prohibited from considering race in admissions since 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209.

“The Supreme Court ignores the tremendous difference between using race to harm minorities as opposed to using race to remedy past discrimination and enhance diversity,” said Chemerinsky at the July 3 event, moderated by OBI Assistant Director Stephen Menendian. “When John Roberts tries to invoke Brown v. Board of Education, he ignores that Brown was dealing with laws that mandated segregation. They were all about subordinating a racial minority as opposed to what Harvard and North Carolina were doing, which was about trying to remedy past discrimination.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photos by (from left) Howard County Library System, Brittany Hosea-Small and Sara Yogi.

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Poets laureate share works about creation, sacrifice and home Jun 30, 2023

In this episode, three poets laureate — Lee Herrick, the first Asian American poet laureate of California; Kealoha, Hawai'i’s first poet laureate; and Nadia Elbgal, the Oakland youth poet laureate — perform and read their works in celebration of National Poetry Month in April.

Kealoha, a slam champion who has a degree in nuclear physics from MIT, began by performing a scene from his film, The Story of Everything, a creation story inspired by his son that tells 13.8 billion years worth of time, from the Big Bang to human life on Earth. Next, Elbgal, a Yemeni American activist and recent Berkeley High graduate, read three works of hers, including "Product of a Blended Culture" and "Spark." The event concluded with a reading by Herrick, who shared several pieces from his latest book of poetry, Scar and Flower.

This April 20 event was presented by UC Berkeley's Arts Research Center in partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation, and co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender and the English and ethnic studies departments at Berkeley.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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Biden economic adviser on building a clean energy economy Jun 16, 2023

Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and chief economist to the Investing in America Cabinet, discusses Biden's plan to build a clean energy economy in the U.S.

"The president has made clear, I feel like gazillions of times at this point, that his goal is to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out," began Boushey at the March 22 event at UC Berkeley. "He wants an economy where growth is strong, sustainable. Where gains are broadly shared. Where the economy is stable, not just strong. Where our industries are globally competitive. Where we have a strong and vibrant middle class. Where we run our economy on clean energy and we bring down carbon emissions. And where we move beyond longstanding inequities.

"And so, we at the CEA, we help the president as he is thinking about the economics behind how we're going to do this. And so, today's conversation, what I want to spend the next little bit of time talking to you about, is about the president's economic blueprint to reach his goals — what motivated it, what it is, why we believe that the evidence shows us that it'll be effective and what successes that we're already seeing."

This talk was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Society and Economy Initiative, the Network for a New Political Economy, the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and Social Science Matrix.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Executive Office of the President of the United States photo via Wikimedia Commons.

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Climate grief: Embracing loss as a catalyst for collective action Jun 03, 2023

Journalist and climate activist Naomi Klein joins Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen and posthumanist thinker Bayo Akomolafe, both senior fellows at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, to discuss climate grief and why they see it not as a reason for apathy, but as an invitation to feel the loss deeply — together — and to use it as fuel for collective action.

"The moments that we face loss, and we really embody the grieving process, is the total moment of surrendering," said Celidwen at the May 4 event, hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute. "Realizing that arrogance that keeps humans in a hierarchical organization, feeling that they are somehow exceptional from and different from all others, that arrogance dissolves the moment that we realize we are powerless, really, to the process of life, to the process of spirit, the process of nature.

"That idea of bringing not only the possibilities of the mysterious, the possibilities of the stories, that not everything can be measured as Western sciences, but rather as how Indigenous sciences speaks about what we don't know, what we can't know, and how we can make meaning of precisely that unknowing, and resting in that unknowing by finding the right insight to the action that we need to do as a collective."

"I was really struck, Yuria, that you said that grief is surrender," Klein said in response. "Because, right before, I was making a couple of notes, thinking about why so many people I know in the climate justice movement are afraid of grief. And I wrote down just now, 'It's because they equate grief with surrender.'

"But, what I meant was political surrender. I think there's a fear that if we fall down, we'll never get up. And that, if we let ourselves feel the depths of the loss, the depths of the fear, that we'll just somehow never be able to be galvanized again. And it's the opposite, really. That grief is uncontainable, including that surrender.

"I work with these students I mentioned, it's not a course on climate anxiety or climate grief. It's a course on climate feelings. And that's the first thing I say is, 'It can be rage, it can be just loss, it can be hope, it can be homesickness. There are so many emotions, and why do we prescribe just this one?'

'But the main thing I want is just feel anything, feel it a lot, because I feel like what is the source of the hopelessness or despair — those are legitimate emotions — but it's a deadeningness, really, that is what I'm most afraid of in myself and in the people I work with."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo of Naomi Klein by Kourosh Keshiri via Flickr. Photos of Yuria Celidwen and Bayo Akomolafe courtesy of the Othering and Belonging Institute.

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Pulitzer-winner Natalie Wolchover: 'Knowledge of physics is a superpower' May 30, 2023

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Natalie Wolchover, a senior editor at Quanta Magazine and winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting, gives the keynote commencement speech to the Class of 2023 at Berkeley Physics

"'Knowledge is power,' my grandpa always used to tell me," said Wolchover at the May 14 ceremony. "Well, I think knowledge of physics is a superpower. We tend to forget, when we're in a bubble of people who've studied physics, as we are in this auditorium, just how unusual it is to understand the laws of nature. Galileo wrote that 'the universe is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.' You all understand the language of nature. You are not wandering about in a dark labyrinth. You have a headlamp on."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo by Sarah Wittmer.

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Sociology Ph.D. graduates on the power of family and deep inquiry May 26, 2023

In this episode, two Ph.D. graduates in sociology — Kristen Nelson and Mario Castillo — give the graduate student address at the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology's spring commencement ceremony.

"Like many of you, I was raised by a single mother," said Castillo at the May 19 event. "Her name is Mariana Leticia Castillo, and she was 17 when I was born. Now, I have tried to imagine what a 16-year-old mother-to-be must have felt as she prepared to bring a new life into this world, how she had hope for my wellness, happiness and success, coupled with an overwhelming sense of worry, anxiety and fear about the uncertain journey ahead.

"My mother's story, as a young working-class woman of color, finding her way as a single parent, combined with my own unique experiences as a queer person of color, propelled me towards deeper inquiry, self-discovery, and ultimately, the fascinating field of sociology."

For Nelson, growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the most segregated metro area in the U.S., opened her eyes to the stark inequality in the country and caused her to ask, "Why is it like this?"

"When issues ... go unspoken, that is a politics of silence that perpetuates exclusion," Nelson said. "This motivates me to practice a politics of articulation, where we choose to say out loud what has been overlooked, because we cannot change what we cover with silence. So, fellow graduates, as we step into the next chapter, one way that we might apply our sociological training is to ask ourselves: What needs to be spoken?"

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Photo courtesy of Kristen Nelson.

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Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones to graduates: 'The world needs your imagination' May 19, 2023

In an impassioned keynote address to graduates of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones urged them to do three things: disrupt, dismantle, discover.

"We are here to disrupt, not just in word, but with our very presence," he said at the May 14 ceremony. "I come standing with my ancestry. I come in a building as a first non-white member to represent my district. I come as the youngest member. I come as somebody who they said, 'You cannot come with long hair and hoop earrings." But you can see I'm my full self because we have to disrupt these systems of white supremacy and of patriarchy and of plantation capitalism that have hijacked our nation and that for too long have been the dominant voice."

Last month, Jones and fellow lawmaker, Justin Pearson, were expelled from the House by the chamber's Republican majority after leading a group of students in a protest demanding gun reform. It was in response to a recent elementary school shooting in Nashville that left six dead, three of them 9-year-olds.

"A lot of people said, 'What were you thinking when you were expelled from the legislature? What was going through your mind?' I said, 'Well, this was just another day at the Tennessee General Assembly.'"

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

Photo by Catharyn Hayne/KLC Fotos.

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How a lie from medieval Europe spread antisemitism across the world May 05, 2023

Magda Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University and author of the 2020 book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, discusses how an anti-Jewish lie that originated in medieval Europe has persisted throughout history and spread antisemitism across the world.

Known as blood libel, the superstitious accusation — that Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread — first emerged in 12th century Europe, but became a dominant narrative in the 15th century.

"Why in the 15th century do we have this sudden shift in quantity, in quality of these accusations?" asks Teter, during the Center for Jewish Studies' Annual Pell Lecture on March 15. "The answer is Simon of Trent, the story of Simon of Trent."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

Photo courtesy of Magda Teter.

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ChatGPT developer John Schulman on making AI more truthful Apr 24, 2023

UC Berkeley alumnus John Schulman, the lead developer of ChatGPT, talks about how AI language models sometimes make things up — often convincingly — and offers solutions on how to fix this problem. Schulman's talk, which took place on April 19, was part of a series of public lectures at Berkeley this spring by the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

Read a Berkeley News Q&A with Schulman in which he discusses why he chose Berkeley for graduate school, the allure of towel-folding robots and what he sees for the future of artificial general intelligence.

UC Berkeley photo by Jim Block.

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International journalists on women's rights in Iran and Afghanistan Apr 07, 2023

Award-winning journalists — Arezou Rezvani, Jane Ferguson, Zahra Joya and Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand — discuss women’s rights in Iran and Afghanistan, and the challenges of reporting as women and about women in these countries.

“I was last in Afghanistan in November of 2021, so the Taliban had been in control for several months,” says Ferguson, a PBS NewsHour correspondent. "Obviously, you’re there, you’re able to make connections with the women — you can talk to them on encrypted services, you can go and meet with them in places. But since then, I’ve been reporting from afar and you have to make connection with young women. And then, you have to try to do it as responsibly as you can. So, we’ll be interviewing them, hiding their faces, in some cases warping their voices, and you can really just take testimony from them on what life is like. It’s hugely challenging."

This March 23 event was organized by the Pulitzer Center and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Support comes from the PIMCO Foundation.

Learn more about the speakers on Berkeley Journalism's website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

Photo by Alisdare Hickson via Flickr.

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Jitendra Malik on the sensorimotor road to artificial intelligence Mar 24, 2023

Jitendra Malik, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, gives the 2023 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture called, "The sensorimotor road to artificial intelligence."

"It's my pleasure to talk on this very, very hot topic today," Malik begins. "But I'm going to talk about natural intelligence first because we can't talk about artificial intelligence without knowing something about the natural variety.

"We could talk about intelligence as having started about 550 million years ago in the Cambrian era, when we had our first multicellular animals that could move about," he continues. "So, these were the first animals that could move, and that gave them an advantage because they could find food in different places. But if you want to move and find food in different places, you need to perceive, you need to know where to go to, which means that you need to have some kind of a vision system or a perception system. And that's why we have this slogan, which is from Gibson, "We see in order to move and we move in order to see."

For a robot to have the ability to navigate specific terrain, like stepping stones or stairs, Malik says, it needs some kind of vision system.

"But how do we train the vision system?" he asks. "We wanted it to learn in the wild. So, here was our intuition: If you think of a robot on stairs, its proprioception, its senses, its joint angles can let it compute the depth of its left leg and right leg and so on. It has that geometry from its joint angles, from its internal state. So, can we use it for training? The idea was the proprioception predicts the depth of every leg and the vision system gets an image. What we asked the vision system to do is to predict what the depth will be 1.5 seconds later.

"That was the idea — that you just shift what signal it will know 1.5 seconds later and use that to do this advanced prediction. So, we have this robot, which is learning day by day. In the first day, it's clumsy. The second day, it goes up further. And then, finally, on the third day, you will see that it ... makes it all the way."

Malik's lecture, which took place on March 20, was the first in a series of public lectures at Berkeley this spring by the world's leading experts on artificial intelligence. Other speakers in the series will include Berkeley Ph.D. recipient John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI and the primary architect of ChatGPT; a professor emeritus at MIT and a leading expert in robotics, and four other leading Berkeley AI faculty members who will discuss recent advances in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and robotics.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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The rise and destruction of the Jewish fashion industry Mar 10, 2023

Uwe Westphal, author of the 2019 book, Fashion Metropolis Berlin 1836-1939: The Story of the Rise and Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry, discusses Berlin's once-thriving Jewish fashion industry and how the Nazi confiscations of Jewish-owned companies in the years before World War II led to the industry's demise.

"The destruction of the entire fashion industry meant forced labor, government-organized theft and the murder and the deportation of Jews," Westphal says. "Today, 78 years after the end of World War II, unlike most other industries in Germany, fashion producers small and large have not yet taken on responsibility for what happened. … A younger generation needs to understand the connection between the Holocaust and the destruction of the Berlin fashion industry.”

This Feb. 15, 2023, lecture was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Goethe-Institut San Francisco and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany San Francisco.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Photo © Ullstein-Bild/Zander&Labisch.

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Economists on what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine Feb 24, 2023

To mark the first anniversary of Russia’s initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are sharing a panel discussion with four leading economists about what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine. In this Feb. 14 talk, the panelists summarize trends in the region before the war, assess war damage and propose paths forward, laying the groundwork for future recovery efforts and increasing the chances of post-war success in revitalizing Ukraine.

A recent Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) report, “Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and Policies,” provides a background for the panel. The report is available to download in English and Ukrainian.

Panelists include:

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science, UC Berkeley
Gérard Roland, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Roger Myerson, David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago; 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, University of Chicago

The Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES) sponsored this event.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UNDP Ukraine photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak.

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Women of the Black Panther Party Feb 11, 2023

In celebration of the new book, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, Judy Juanita, Madalynn Rucker and Ericka Huggins discuss their time with the Black Panther Party.

"I knew that my big purpose was to learn how to love because I was raised in a community that was not loved," says Ericka Huggins, who co-authored Comrade Sisters with photographer Stephen Shames and was director of Oakland Community School led by the Black Panther Party. "I could see the impact on the future generation's understanding that I came from a generation that didn't have what we were offering. And it worked."

This conversation, which took place on Oct. 20, 2022, was hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists at UC Berkeley and The Reva and David Logan Gallery of Documentary Photography at Berkeley Journalism.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Artist William Kentridge on staying open to the 'less good' ideas Jan 28, 2023

World-renowned South African artist William Kentridge discusses the process of making the 2019 chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. He also touches on why artists should stay open to new ideas, the complex relationship between humans and algorithms — "one has to make space for that which does not compute," he says — and the "unavoidable optimism" in the activity of making.

During the 2022-23 academic year, Cal Performances, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley are participating in a campuswide residency with Kentridge.

Cal Performances will present the U.S. premiere of SIBYL on March 17-19. SIBYL is comprised of two parts: The first part of the program, The Moment Has Gone, is a film by Kentridge with live music featuring a piano score by Kyle Shepherd and an all-male vocal chorus led by Nhlanhla Mahlangu; the second part is the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. Learn more about the residency and upcoming events.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Photo by Marc Shoul.

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Adriana Green and Nadia Ellis discuss 'The Yellow House' Jan 13, 2023

Adriana Green, a Ph.D. student in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, and Nadia Ellis, an associate professor in the Department of English, discuss Sarah Broom's The Yellow House, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The memoir, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East, tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home.

"I am a diaspora scholar and I've had to explain what my field is to many people," says Ellis, who specializes in Black diasporic, Caribbean and postcolonial literatures and cultures. "Sometimes people seem to not understand what the word 'diaspora' means. And I think this is such a wonderful book that one can offer as an example of what it means to feel as if one is both from one place and also displaced from that place — to feel as if the place that claims you maybe most closely is also the place where you can't live, which is an extraordinary and painful and very, very idiosyncratic feeling to have. That's very characteristic actually of Black life and Black life in America."

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Emiliana Simon-Thomas on where happiness comes from (revisiting) Dec 31, 2022

In episode #158 of Berkeley Talks, we revisit a lecture by Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, in which she discusses happiness — what it means, where it comes from and how we can enhance it in our lives.

“Where does happiness come from?” asks Simon-Thomas, who co-teaches the Science of Happiness, an online course that explores the roots of a happy and meaningful life. “Humans have been wondering this for centuries. Early thought and philosophy on happiness was that it was just luck. It was divine favor. It was in the stars whether or not you ended up a happy person or not.”

The Greeks and Romans, she says, had the idea that happiness was tied to how virtuous a person was. In another stretch of history, people believed that happiness was about maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain. And then, finally, and perhaps the most recent thinking, she says, is that happiness comes from social connection, from feeling a sense of belonging and community.

“There’s some really compelling neuroscience studies that show that if we are isolated, this actually engages pathways and structures in our brain that signal vigilance to threat. So, being alone, being isolated, is actually not a safe state for the average human.”

This lecture, given on July 28, 2021, was sponsored by Science at Cal.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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The social safety net as an investment in children Dec 16, 2022

Hilary Hoynes, a UC Berkeley professor of economics and of public policy, and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities, discusses the emerging research that examines how the social safety net in the United States — a collection of public programs that delivers aid to low-income populations — affects children's life trajectories.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Photo by Kamaji Ogino via Pexels.

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Inna Sovsun on what's next in Russia's war on Ukraine Dec 02, 2022

Ukrainian Member of Parliament Inna Sovsun joins Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, and Janet Napolitano, a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and former secretary of homeland security, to discuss the impact of the war and what comes next for the people of Ukraine. This Nov. 8 event was co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy; the Center for Security in Politics; the Center for Studies in Higher Education; the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies; and the Institute of European Studies.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Poet Alex Dimitrov reads from 'Love and Other Poems' Nov 18, 2022

Alex Dimitrov reads from his 2021 book of poems Love and Other Poems. The Sept. 8 reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event, Lunch Poems.

Here’s “July,” one of the poems Dimitrov read during the event:

At last it’s impossible to think of anything

as I swim through the heat on Broadway and disappear in the Strand. Nobody

on these shelves knows who I am

but I feel so seen, it’s easy to be aimless

not having written a line for weeks.

Outside New York continues to be New York.

I was half expecting it to be LA

but no luck. No luck with the guy

I’m seeing, no luck with money,

no luck with becoming a saint.

I do not want you, perfect life.

I decided to stay a poet long ago,

I know what I’m in for. And still

the free space of the sky

lures me back out—not even

canonical beauty can keep me inside

(and beauty, I’m done with you too).

I guess, after all, I’ll take love—

sweeping, all-consuming,

grandiose love. Don’t just call

or ask to go to a movie.

That’s off my list too!

I want absolutely everything

on this Friday afternoon

when not one person is looking for me.

I’m crazy and lonely.

I’ve never been boring.

And believe it or not, I’m all I want.

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry — Love and Other Poems, Together and by Ourselves and Begging for It — and the chapbook American Boys. His poems have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review and Poetry. He has taught writing at Princeton University, Columbia University and New York University, among other institutions. Previously, he was the senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine.

Lunch Poems is an ongoing poetry reading series at Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 p.m. to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month. Find upcoming talks on the Lunch Poems website and watch videos of past readings on the Lunch Poems YouTube channel.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Sylvie Rosokoff.

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Judith Heumann on the long fight for inclusion Nov 04, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 154, leading disability rights activist and UC Berkeley alumna Judith Heumann discusses her lifelong fight for inclusion and equality. This Oct. 26 talk was part of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures, a series sponsored by Berkeley's Graduate Division.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Judith Heumann.

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Indigenous access, political ecology in settler states Oct 22, 2022

Clint Carroll, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, gives a talk called "Reuniting with Our Lands and Waters: Indigenous Access and Political Ecology in Settler States."

"The early periods of what is known as the U.S. Federal Indian Policy are defined in terms of the specific type of dispossession they entailed," begins Carroll, author of the 2015 book Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. "While the removal era of the 1830s forcibly relocated tribes hundreds and thousands of miles from their traditional homelands, the creation of reservations beginning in the mid-1800s also entailed numerous relocations via treaties and land cessions.

"The early U.S. conservation movement, coinciding roughly with the establishment of Indian reservations, excluded Native peoples from former hunting-and-gathering areas in the name of wilderness preservation," Carroll continues. "The allotment era, from about 1887 to 1934, broke up Indigenous systems of communal land ownership and opened Native lands to speculators in the market. Since this time, access has become a principle issue for Native peoples — specifically, the ability to access lands and waters through which to enact culturally sustaining practices and ceremonies that are tied to relations of reciprocal care."

This Sept. 22 UC Berkeley event was sponsored by the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, part of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. It was co-sponsored by the Native American Studies Program, Native American Student Development, the American Indian Graduate Program, the American Indian Graduate Student Association and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Clint Carroll.

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U.S. military bases in World War II Latin America Oct 10, 2022

UC Berkeley history professor Rebecca Herman discusses her new book, Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of U.S. Military Bases in World War II Latin America. She’s joined by Margaret Chowning, professor and Sonne Chair in Latin American History at Berkeley, and Kyle Jackson, a transnational historian of the Americas and a Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in history.

"Typically, when the war comes up, the remarkable thing is that it was this moment where almost every country in the Americas banded together, united around the war effort," says Herman.

"So, when I talk about cooperating with the colossus, I'm thinking in this sort of critical way about how people in the region during the Second World War tried to make the most of the United States' sudden attention to the region and willingness to share resources with the region and willingness to send weapons to the region, while also trying to mitigate U.S. overreach and to grapple with the real significant asymmetries of power that structured that cooperative relationship."

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Novelist Ilija Trojanow on the utopian prerogative Sep 23, 2022

Novelist Ilija Trojanow discusses why we need to embrace the idea of utopia in order to imagine a better future.

"It's important to not confuse what does exist with what is impossible, which is how most people use the word "utopian" in everyday parlance," Trojanow says. "Progress has, at times, been utopia come true. By envisaging differing realities, we are imagining alternatives into existence.

"Truly utopian narratives challenge existing preconceptions by opening windows of thought and fantasy that give life to a multitude of possibilities," Trojanow continues. "In order to survive, we will have to redefine our modes of planetary existence, and this will be impossible without powerful utopian imagination. Thus, utopia is not the art of the impossible, it is the rational of the necessary."

Tojanow, author of more than 60 fiction and nonfiction books, delivered the 2022 Mosse Lecture at UC Berkeley on Sept. 1. The annual lecture was organized by Berkeley's Department of German and the Institute of European Studies, in collaboration with the Mosse Foundation and the German Historical Institute's Pacific Office at Berkeley.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Ilija Trojanow.

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Activist Pua Case on the movement to protect Mauna Kea Sep 09, 2022

Pua Case, a Native Hawaiian activist and caretaker from the Flores-Case ʻOhana family, discusses the movement to protect Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii and the tallest mountain in the world.

"We have been standing successfully for 12 years against the building of a huge telescope," Case said at a Berkeley Center of New Media event on Aug. 29, 2022. "Not because it's a telescope, but because it's an 18-story building of any kind that would be built on the northern plateau in a pristine landscape on a sacred mountain, and for so many reasons.

"For 12 years, we have remained visible, we have remained committed, we have remained engaged and fully activated. But it is as if on a daily basis we have never stood because they are determined to build. And so, any of you who are facing what we're facing today, when a corporation, an institution, a developer, whatever the case may be — for us, five countries are determined to build no matter the consequence — it is almost as if you have to re-establish every day that you are here."

This talk was presented as part of the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium, the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series, and the Indigenous Technologies Initiative. It was co-sponsored by the American Indian Graduate Program, the Arts Research Center, the Department of Ethnic Studies, Media Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and Native American Studies.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Matt Biddulph via Flickr.

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How we learn language across communities and cultures Aug 27, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 149, Mahesh Srinivasan, an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Psychology, discusses the importance of child-directed speech in language learning, how poverty may suppress parents' speech to their children and how children learn language from overheard speech, a main form of children’s early experience with language in many cultures around the world.

This March 2022 lecture was sponsored by Science At Cal.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Esteban Benites via Unsplash.

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Learning from nature to design better robots Aug 13, 2022

Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, squirrels, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics and other medical equipment.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

Photo by Tate Lohmiller via Unsplash.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Scholars on using fantasy to reimagine Blackness Jul 29, 2022

A panel of scholars discusses UC Berkeley professor Darieck Scott's new book Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, which explores how fantasies of Black power and triumph in superhero comics and other genres create challenges to — and respite from — white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Graphic courtesy of the Othering and Belonging Institute.

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America wants gun control. Why doesn't it have it? (revisiting) Jul 15, 2022

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian, in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020.

"Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continued, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the American narrative, and the inability of gun control advocates to develop a counter-narrative. ... When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force and power, a broad atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than narrower rational arguments to contain it."

Listen to the lecture and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Detail of a mural by Kyle Holbrook and local youth in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Terence Faircloth via Flickr)

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ACLU leader on how voter suppression works Jul 01, 2022

Abdi Soltani, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, discussed on Feb. 18, 2022, key moments for voting rights and elections throughout U.S. history, current threats to voting that are unfolding across the country and work the ACLU is doing in California.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

AP photo by Morry Gash.

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'Mother Jones' editor on how the super-rich really live Jun 17, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 144, Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic joins Berkeley Journalism professor David Barstow to discuss his new book, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live — and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.

This conversation was streamed live on May 4, 2022.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Climate displacement and remaking the built environment Jun 03, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 143, a panel of UC Berkeley experts discuss climate displacement — what it means to abandon places, the power dynamics between the Global South and the Global North, challenges for both the sending and receiving regions, and what needs to happen to address this fast-growing problem.

Panelists include faculty members from Berkeley's new cluster in climate equity and environmental justice:

Maya Carrasquillo, civil and environmental engineering
Daniel Aldana Cohen, sociology
Zoe Hamstead, city and regional planning
Danielle Rivera, landscape architecture and environmental planning
Moderated by Karen Chapple, director of Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project and the University of Toronto’s School of Cities

This April 25 event is part of Cal Performances' Illuminations: Place and Displacement series.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Photo by Pablo Paredes.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Timnit Gebru on how change happens through collective action May 31, 2022

In a special episode, Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and one of the most prominent researchers working in the field of ethics in artificial intelligence, gives the keynote address to the UC Berkeley School of Information graduating class on May 16. In the speech, Gebru touches on collective action, interconnectedness and the loneliness that may accompany standing on “the right side of history.”

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Photo by Noah Berger.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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Scholars on Roman Vishniac's photos of Jewish life before the Holocaust May 20, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 141, a panel of scholars discuss the work of Roman Vishniac, a renowned Russian American photographer who took thousands of photos over seven decades and across three continents. Although Vishniac’s genres were diverse, he’s best known for images that he took of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

“These photographs are distinguished by their epiphenomena, the life circumstances of their subjects and the narratives that have surrounded these images,” said Jeffrey Shandler, professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, at a two-day event in May presented by The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in collaboration with Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies. “Shortly after these photographs were taken, most of the Jews they depict met a terrible fate during World War II. Those few who survived the Holocaust had to start their lives over in radically different circumstances."

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo of Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz by Roman Vishniac, Mukacevo, ca. 1937-38.

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An update on Public Service Loan Forgiveness May 06, 2022

In episode 140 of Berkeley Talks, a panel of student loan experts discuss the Public Service Loan Forgiveness waiver, the recently extended COVID payment pause and student debt cancellation.

Panelists of this April 2022 talk included:

Kat Welbeck, Student Borrower Protection Center
Suzanne Martindale, California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation
Kyra Taylor, National Consumer Law Center
Moderated by Amanda Prasuhn, Berkeley Law Financial Aid Office

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Elena Zhukova.

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Damilola Ogunbiyi on driving an equitable energy transition Apr 22, 2022

In episode 139 of Berkeley Talks, Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All, gives the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group's 28th Annual Lecture on Energy and Environment. In the March 31, 2022 talk, Ogunbiyi discusses how to drive a just, inclusive and equitable transition to affordable and sustainable energy for all, and how the Russia-Ukraine war is affecting energy markets around the world.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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(Photo by Bamas100 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Sociologist Harry Edwards on sport in society Apr 08, 2022

In Berkeley Talks episode 138, Harry Edwards, a renowned sports activist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, discusses the intersections of race and sport, athletes' struggle for definitional authority and the power of sport to change society.

"You can change society by changing people's perceptions and understandings of the games they play," said Edwards in March at a campus event sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Cal Athletics. "I'm saying whether it's race relations in America, whether it's relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, whether it's what's going on in South Africa with apartheid, you can leverage sport to change people's perceptions and understandings of those relationships. Change society by changing people's perceptions and understandings of the games they play."

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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(Photo courtesy of Harry Edwards)

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A Poetry for the People conversation Mar 25, 2022

The Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley’s 2021-22 Critical Conversations speaker series is a celebration of the life and legacy of June Jordan, an award-winning poet, activist and longtime professor in the department.

At Berkeley, Jordan founded the Poetry for the People program, where writers of all levels wrote and showcased their own poems, and taught poetry to other university students, high school students and community members.

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, two Berkeley alumni and former students of Poetry for the People — Samiya Bashir, an associate professor of creative writing at Reed College, and Solmaz Sharif, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University — read their work, share some of their favorite poems by Jordan, and discuss the Poetry for the People program and the impact it continues to have on their lives.

The Feb. 28 conversation was moderated by Chiyuma Elliot, a poet and associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Mapping the brain to understand health, aging and disease Mar 11, 2022

UC Berkeley psychology professor Jack Gallant discusses functional brain mapping for understanding health, aging and disease. The lecture, given on Jan. 20, was part of a series celebrating the 100th anniversary of Berkeley Psychology.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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(Image by Milad Fakurian via Unsplash)

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UC Berkeley experts on the invasion of Ukraine Feb 28, 2022

In episode 135 of Berkeley Talks, UC Berkeley political scientist George Breslauer and economics professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine — what his motivations are and how they compare to Hitler's and Stalin's, if the invasion was avoidable and what should be done about it.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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The performance of labor Feb 25, 2022

Black feminist artists and cultural workers communally explore the questions of how the forms and methods of opera, surrealism, free jazz, poetry and dance help us communicate the concerns of radical Black feminisms. This Feb. 11 conversation was organized by the Black Studies Collaboratory, a collaborative initiative to address racial inequality through bold and unique humanities-based research projects, in partnership with Cal Performances.

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How archaeology is used in comics Feb 11, 2022

Paulina Przystupa, a Ph.D. student at the University of New Mexico, discusses how archaeology inspires comic books and proposes ways archeologists can help build connections with the comic book community.

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The EU in crisis Jan 28, 2022

The co-editors of The Palgrave Handbook of EU Crisesdiscuss their research that explores the European Union's institutional and policy responses to crises across policy domains and institutions, including the Euro crisis, Brexit, the Ukraine crisis, the refugee crisis and the global health crisis caused by COVID-19.

"The EU has been surprisingly able to cope with crises of different kinds through adaptations, through reforms and through further integration," said Jarle Trondal, professor of public administration at the University of Agder in Norway, at the Jan. 13 event. "We argue that crises no longer pose existential threats to the EU as a political order."

Panelists include:

Akasemi Newsome, associate director of UC Berkeley's Institute of European Studies and executive director of the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study
Marianne Riddervold, professor of political science at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Institute of European Studies
Jarle Trondal, professor of public administration at the University of Agder in Norway

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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(Photo by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash)

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'Can we change nature — this time, to save it?' Jan 14, 2022

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Elizabeth Kolbert in conversation with David Ackerly, dean of UC Berkeley's Rausser College of Natural Resources, and Geeta Anand, dean of Berkeley Journalism, as part of the 2021 Horace Albright Lecture in Conservation.

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of The Sixth Extinction, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015, and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In her 2021 book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Kolbert asks the question: “After doing so much damage, can we change nature — this time, to save it?”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Eva Paterson on transforming the nation's consciousness on race Dec 17, 2021

In episode 130 of Berkeley Talks, Eva Paterson, president and co-founder of the Equal Justice Society, talks in 2017 with Savala Nolan (then Savala Trepczynski), director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, about when Paterson first realized the need for social justice, litigating implicit bias and why she loves — and hates — America. This conversation first appeared on Nolan's 2017 summer podcast series, Be the Change.

Berkeley Talks is going on winter break. We'll be back with new episodes on Jan. 14, 2022.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

(The Atlantic photo by Edwin Tse)

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Why do leaves change color in the fall? Dec 03, 2021

Lewis Feldman, UC Berkeley professor of plant biology and executive director of the UC Botanical Garden, explores why some leaves appear to change color in the fall season — exhibiting reds, oranges and yellows — and the environmental influences that affect the brilliance of these colors. He also explains the evolutionary benefits of a tree losing its leaves.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

(UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)

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Scholars reflect on new book, 'Atmospheres of Violence' Nov 19, 2021

A panel of artists, organizers and academics discuss UC Berkeley professor Eric Stanley's 2021 book that interrogates why, in a time when we're told LGBT rights are advancing in the U.S., anti-trans violence continues to rise.

Panelists include:

Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, UC Santa Cruz
Dean Spade, professor, Seattle University School of Law
Eric A. Stanley, associate professor, UC Berkeley
Jules Gill-Peterson, associate professor, Johns Hopkins University
LaVelle Ridley, Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan
Moderated by Courtney Desiree Morris, artist and assistant professor, UC Berkeley

This Nov. 2, 2021 talk was co-sponsored by Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Center for Race and Gender and the American Cultures Center.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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How technology is transforming religion Nov 05, 2021

A panel of scholars explore how technology is changing how and when we practice religion, as well as our notions of religious community, religious doctrine and what it means to be religious.

Panelists at the Nov 2. event included:

Steven Barrie-Anthony, research associate at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion Kelsy Burke
Associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Erika Gault, assistant professor of Africana Studies from the University of Arizona
Heather Mellquist Lehto, postdoctoral fellow with Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
Moderated by Carolyn Chen, associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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(Photo by Ashkan Forouzani via Unsplash)

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Finding hope for biodiversity conservation Oct 22, 2021

In episode 126 of Berkeley Talks, evolutionary biologist Erica Bree Rosenblum, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, tells a story about when she held a little frog — the last known member of its species — in her hand as it died. "I am a scientist who studies extinction," says Rosenblum. "I am a scientist who thinks about biodiversity and interconnectedness every single day ... but the difference between thinking about it and feeling a life slipping away in my hand and knowing that it was the last of an entire branch of the biodiversity on our planet was emotionally impactful in a way that I never could have expected." In that moment, she says, she woke up to how hard it is to feel interconnectedness for students in society, even if we know it to be true. In this talk, Rosenblum explores why we keep this feeling of connection at arm's length and how we can begin to build it back into our lives. This talk was given on Oct. 8 and was sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.(Photo by Eric Sonstroem via Flickr)

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Berkeley experts on how to fight disinformation Oct 08, 2021

A panel of leading Berkeley experts describe the harms of disinformation and potential solutions to its spread, from measures to strengthen old-school local news media to government regulation of tech titans like Facebook and Twitter. But there’s a critical obstacle: Efforts to directly block disinformation could challenge core American values, such as free speech and freedom of the press. Scholars in the panel: Geeta Anand, dean of Berkeley Journalism; Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; Hany Farid, associate dean and head of the School of Information; Susan D. Hyde, chair of the Department of Political Science; john powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute; and moderator Henry Brady, former dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News. (Photo: Joe Flood via Flickr; Music: "Silver Lanyard" by Blue Dot Sessions)

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Scholars discuss 'New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century' Sep 24, 2021

Judith Butler, a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and Mel Y. Chen, an associate professor in Berkeley's Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, joined in conversation about Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's expansive exhibition, New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century. "There's never been anything mild about feminisms, in the plural," said Butler at the Sept. 20 event. "It has always been a life and death struggle from the start." Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. (Artwork: "Stigmata" by Linda Stark, 2011)

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Should we strive for unity? Or something else? Sep 10, 2021

In his inaugural address, President Biden called for Americans to unite more than any other U.S. president. But UC Berkeley experts say unity is unrealistic — at least, right now — and offer other ways to create a more just society. "Where we are today is a result of decades upon decades of systemic and structural race, class and gender-based injustice," said Sandra Bass, associate dean of students and director of the Public Service Center, during an April 9, 2021, panel discussion sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Center (OLLI). "To think that we can just jump over all of that and leave it unexamined and unresolved and go straight to unity is not just unrealistic. It ignores the genuine harm these systems have and continue to perpetuate, and suggests we all just need to move on without addressing them. We can't leapfrog over the damage that has been done. We have to go through it, not around it. Given our history, any hope of moving towards some understanding of our shared humanity, and our shared destinies, requires us to go through the painstaking process of truth telling, and reparation in all its dimensions." Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. (Art by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash)

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Emiliana Simon-Thomas on where happiness comes from Aug 27, 2021

Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, discusses happiness — what it means, where it comes from and how we can enhance it in each of our lives — during a Science at Cal lecture on July 28, 2021. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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'Indigenous United' student podcast hosts on being Native at Berkeley Aug 13, 2021

In episode 121 of Berkeley Talks, graduate students Sierra Edd (Diné) and Ataya Cesspooch talk about their experiences at UC Berkeley as Native American students and reflect on the history and future of the Hearst Museum and Berkeley’s relationships with Indigenous communities. Edd and Cesspooch are co-hosts of Indigenous United, a podcast from Native American Student Development at Berkeley that explores Indigenous issues through interviews with Native artists, scholars and activists. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Roger McNamee on his quest to stop Facebook Jul 30, 2021

Longtime venture capitalist Roger McNamee discusses how he, an early Facebook investor and former adviser to Mark Zuckerberg, came to realize the damage caused by the social media giant and others like it, and how he's committed to try to stop them. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News. (Photo by Alessio Jacona via Flickr)

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Poet Shane McCrae reads 'The Mind of Hell' and other new works Jul 16, 2021

In episode 119 of Berkeley Talks, Shane McCrae, a poet born in Portland, Oregon, who was kidnapped by his maternal grandparents at age 3, reads new works about his experience as a child growing up with his captors. The April 1 reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event, Lunch Poems. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Linda Rugg on Native American repatriation at UC Berkeley Jul 02, 2021

Berkeley's associate vice chancellor for research discusses the measures being taken to repatriate Native American ancestral remains and sacred artifacts held by the campus.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Rucker Johnson on why school integration works (revisiting) Jun 18, 2021

Today, we're sharing an episode from 2019:

Brown v. Board of Education was hailed as a landmark decision for civil rights. But decades later, many consider school integration a failure. UC Berkeley professor Rucker Johnson's 2019 book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, shows the exact opposite is true. The book looks at decades of studies to show that students of all races who attended integrated schools fared better than those who did not. In this January 2019 interview with Goldman School of Public Policy Dean Henry Brady, Johnson explains how he and his team analyzed the impact of not just integration, but school funding policies and the Head Start program.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Labor lawyer reviews the American Rescue Plan Act Jun 04, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Bay Area labor lawyer Bill Sokol discusses the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law by President Biden on March 11, 2021.

"What I want to talk about," began Sokol, "is what I think is an incredibly spectacular piece of legislation, perhaps the largest, deepest, broadest piece of social legislation since the New Deal. And certainly, since the LBJ Great Society more than half a century ago."

During his May 12 talk, sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), Sokol outlined the ways the act builds a bridge towards economic recovery, invests in racial justice and addresses intergenerational inequities that have worsened in the wake of COVID-19.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Journalists on reporting in China and U.S.-China relations May 21, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand and New York Times reporter and UC Berkeley alumnus Edward Wong discuss international reporting on China and the interplay among journalism, public opinion and government policy.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Wally Adeyemo to Berkeley graduates: You are prepared to shape the world May 19, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and UC Berkeley alumnus, delivers the keynote address at Berkeley's commencement on Saturday, May 15.

"The Berkeley community is made up of people that show up in all the places where decisions and history tend to be made," said Adeyemo. "In fact, when I received the e-mail with the subject line “Cal Graduation speaker, ” I assumed it was a polite request for me to forward the speaking invitation to my boss, Janet Yellen — Secretary Yellen, the towering economic mind who has helped us weather the economic crises of the past 20 years — and a long-standing member of the UC Berkeley faculty."

"I only have one advantage over Secretary Yellen today," he continued, "and that is: I graduated from Cal. I know there is no better place on Earth to get an education."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Filmmaker Steve McQueen to Berkeley students: 'Take a chance' May 08, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, British filmmaker and video artist Steven McQueen, best known for his Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave, talks about his first experience at Tate Modern in London as an 8-year-old, how he's never pursued a project for the money and why he thinks experiencing art in the world — and not on a small screen in your hand — is so important.

This March 30 talk was part of UC Berkeley's Arts + Design Thursdays, a lecture series on time-based media art that features leading media artists, curators and thinkers. The series was made possible with support from the Kramlich Art Foundation, run by Berkeley alumna Pamela Kramlich.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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State lawmakers on the future of California Apr 23, 2021

California state legislators share their visions of California and the policies needed to achieve that future. The panel discussion, sponsored by UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, includes senators Anna Caballero and Nancy Skinner and assemblymembers David Chiu and James Ramos.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Franklin Zimring on the tragedy of U.S. police killings Apr 09, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Berkeley Law professor Franklin Zimring, author of the 2017 book When Police Kill, discusses why police kill far more citizens in the United States than in other developed countries.

"About 1,000 times a year in the United States, civilians are shot and killed by local police, and the authorities say that such killings were either necessary or at least justified," began Zimring. "... That's three killings a day, every day. And that's too many violent deaths in a country which already suffers from an excess of violent death."

Zimring's March 29 lecture, "Police Killings: An American Tragedy," was part of the 2021 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture series.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Bess Williamson on the history of disability and design Mar 26, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Bess Williamson, associate professor of art history theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Accessible America, explores the history of design and its response to disability rights, from the end of World War II to the present day.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Novelist Alice Walker: 'Dance when you feel like dancing' Mar 12, 2021

"I think that part of why we are lost is that we've forgotten we have to study where we've come from and what we're doing," said novelist Alice Walker at a UC Berkeley event last month. "And I just can't stress enough how much I want our people — all people, but, you know, our people — to really get a grip on how you have to understand where you've been in order to know where you are or where you're going."

Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her novel, The Color Purple, was in conversation on Feb. 15, 2021, with Ra Malika Imhotep, a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley, and Darieck Scott, a professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, as part of the department's spring 2021 Critical Conversations series.

Walker's parting advice?

"Study, be free, enjoy your life, dance when you feel like dancing, sleep outside under the moon ... Live your life. Live it. I don't care if every time you open your mouth, somebody's ready to throw something at you or trip you up or lie about you. The joy of being here, I think, only comes if you are really here as you."

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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'Social Dilemma' star on fighting the disinformation machine Feb 26, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, former Google design ethicist and star of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, discusses how fake news spreads faster than factual news — a result of citizens sharing emotionally resonant misinformation or disinformation, often weaponized for profit and propaganda purposes, while tech algorithms amplify the viral spread.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Charles Henry on the case for reparations Feb 12, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Charles Henry, professor emeritus of African American studies at UC Berkeley and author of Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations, discusses why reparations are gaining mainstream support, why he believes they are a solution and what could enable Black Americans to feel "acknowledged, redressed and with closure."

This talk, given in October of 2020, is part of "America's Unfinished Work," a series by Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Center (OLLI).

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Will the post-pandemic era be the next 'roaring '20s'? Jan 29, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, discusses the economic forecast — how the post-pandemic U.S. economy might compare to that of the so-called roaring 1920s.

"When I studied the 1920s, I was really focused on consumer spending, particularly household spending for durable goods — cars, appliances, furniture, jewelry — and the role of installment credit in making a boom in consumer durables possible," Olney said on UCLA's Forecast Direct in January.

But, she said, today, much of the nation's consumer spending is on services — going to restaurants, getting a haircut — which lengthens the time it takes to recover from a recession.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Late filmmaker Marlon Riggs on making ‘Tongues Untied’ Jan 15, 2021

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, a former Berkeley Journalism professor and alumnus, discusses his 1989 documentary, Tongues Untied, during a screening of his groundbreaking film at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1990.

In Tongues Untied, an experimental and deeply personal film, Riggs combines documentary footage with poetry, dance, music and performance with his own on-camera revelations to explore Black gay love and sexuality in the U.S. At the end of the film, words flash on the screen: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Revisiting: Comedian Maz Jobrani on noticing the good in his life Jan 01, 2021

In this Berkeley Talks episode, we revisit an interview that we first shared in 2019:

Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer."

In February 2019, Jobrani was a guest on the Science of Happiness, a podcast from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Poet Aria Aber reads from her 2019 book 'Hard Damage' Dec 19, 2020

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Aria Aber, a poet born to Afghan refugees and raised in Germany, who now lives in Oakland, California, reads from her first book of poems, Hard Damage, published in 2019. The early November reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event, Lunch Poems.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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U.S. elections 2020 and implications for the Americas Dec 04, 2020

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, experts discuss the forces that shaped the outcome of the U.S. elections in November and the implications of the elections for the U.S. and the countries of Latin America.

"Hispanics are the new swing voters," said Maria Escheveste, a senior scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute, who joined Paul Pierson, a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Colombian investigative journalist Daniel Coronell, at the Nov. 20, 2020 campus webinar.

It's imperative that Democrats realize that the Latinx community isn't a monolith, she said, and that immigration isn't the only issue every Latinx person cares about. "We are so diverse because we're generationally diverse — linguistically, racially, ethnically," said Escheveste. "Demography is not destiny."

Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Threats to abortion rights and how people are resisting Nov 22, 2020

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, a panel of scholars — Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges; Carol Joffe, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC San Francisco; and Jill Adams, co-founder and executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law — discuss how race, class and reproductive rights intersect and how people are choosing and resorting to self-directed and community-directed care to circumnavigate the structural inequalities in health care access.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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How Native women challenged a 1900s Bay Area assimilation program Nov 07, 2020

This episode of Berkeley Talks is a 2019 interview on KALX's The Graduates with Katie Keliiaa, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies. In this interview, Keliiaa discusses her research on the Bay Area Outing Program, an early 20th century assimilation program that took Native American women out of their tribal lands and brought them to the Bay Area to perform domestic work.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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How Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' took on a life of its own Oct 27, 2020

In this special Halloween-inspired episode of Berkeley Talks, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ joins Manual Cinema's co-artistic director Drew Dir to discuss the collective's presentation of Frankenstein, a Cal Performances co-commission, in a talk moderated by Cal Performances' executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen.

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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The violent underworlds of El Salvador and their ties to the U.S. Oct 23, 2020

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Salvadoran American journalist and activist Roberto Lovato, discusses his new book Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, with Jess Alvarenga, an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker and a graduate of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

In Unforgetting, Lovato exposes how the U.S.-backed military dictatorship was responsible for killing 85% of the 75,000 to 80,000 people killed during the Salvadoran Civil War that was fought from 1979 to 1992.

"The book is ... a journey through different underworlds — the underworlds of the guerillas, the underworlds of the gangs, the underworlds of our family histories and secrets, the underworld of the secrets of nations, the things that countries don't like for us to know, I mean, which is theoretically how you get a president like Donald Trump, for example," said Lovato.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Portraits of power: Women of the 116th Congress Oct 09, 2020

"I would say the loudest, boldest, most powerful voices coming out of Washington have been the voices of women," said U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood (IL-14). "The way that we, collectively, have reframed the conversation about where this country is going has really, I think, been jarring for some of those who have been the power class in Washington for decades."

Underwood was part of a panel that discussed the history-making women of the 116th Congress, and a recently published New York Times book that features powerful portraits of all but one Congresswoman. Also part of the conversation was Rep. Jackie Speier (CA-14), UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in political science and photojournalist Elizabeth Herman and New York Times photo editor Marisa Schwartz Taylor.

Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley scholars on the legal legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Sep 28, 2020

Following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18, 2020, Berkeley Law professors — Amanda Tyler, Catherine Fisk, Orin Kerr, Bertrall Ross and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky — came together to discuss Ginsburg's legacy, what will be the likely effects of her no longer being in the Supreme Court and what is likely to happen in the nomination and confirmation process of a new justice.

"Her legacy as an advocate completely changed the face of American society," said Tyler, who clerked for Ginsburg in 1999. "As an advocate, she opened the eyes of the Supreme Court to the lived experiences of both men and women who are held back by gender stereotypes. Because of that, she was able to convince them, to educate them, to teach them as to how gender stereotypes do that, not just to women but to men as well, and how putting women on a pedestal, as Justice Brennan said, and Justice Ginsburg loved this quote, is actually putting them in a cage. It's holding them back."

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

Photo credit: Supreme Court of the United States via Flickr

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How plantation museum tours distort the reality of slavery Sep 25, 2020

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Stephen Small, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and interim director for the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, discusses research from his upcoming book, tentatively titled Inside the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana.

Since the 1990s, Small has visited more than 200 plantation museum sites in 10 states. Tours of these sites included narratives that privileged white elites and consistently avoided mention of slavery and the experience of enslaved people, says Small.

"Slavery is typically described in passive, general and abstract ways," said Small. "If mentioned at all, Black people typically appear as an undifferentiated stereotypical mass, with few exceptions."

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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How to use sleep and circadian science to get better rest Sep 11, 2020

As the global pandemic stretches on and massive wildfires rage along the West Coast, many people are finding it hard — if not impossible — to get the restful sleep they need. But Allison Harvey, a professor of clinical psychology and director of the Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic at UC Berkeley, says although anxiety can make it more difficult to sleep well, there are evidence-based treatments that can help.

"I think as humans, at this point, we either have too many people in our lives and in our faces, or we're lonely and we're maybe feeling that as we go off to sleep," said Harvey, of life during the pandemic. "We need to go to safe burrows and nests in order to sleep. So, things that are comforting really make a difference to us."

On Aug. 7, Harvey gave a talk, sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how changing certain behaviors — when and how we wake up and go to bed, for instance — can allow us to experience the sleep rhythms we naturally have.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Why the 1960s song 'Little Boxes' still strikes a chord today Aug 28, 2020

"Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same. There’s a pink one, and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses all went to the university, where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same. And there's doctors and lawyers and business executives, and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same."

That's the first part of the song "Little Boxes," written by Berkeley alumna and political activist Malvina Reynolds in 1962. In the first episode of a new campus podcast — the Berkeley Podcast for Music — professor Nicholas Mathew talks with Reynolds' daughter, Nancy Schimmel, as well as Berkeley professors Margaret Crawford from architecture, Timothy Hampton from French and comparative literature and Maria Sonevytsky from music. They discuss Reynolds' life, music, activism and the contested politics of her most famous song "Little Boxes" — a satire of suburban conformity inspired by the 1960s housing developments in Daly City.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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The power of mentorship, sisterhood in politics Aug 14, 2020

"I don't know anybody who can honestly say there hasn't been somebody in their life that helped them along," said Louise Renne, a lawyer who served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as San Francisco City Attorney. "And I try to pay it back by working with young people in public housing here in San Francisco."

Renne took part in a panel discussion — "Bay Area Women in Politics" — hosted by the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center in July 2020. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Shanelle Scales-Preston, who sits on the Pittsburg City Council, also spoke on the panel.

"I think all of us will say we have to be optimists to survive in these careers," said Schaaf. "It's what gets you out of bed in the morning because we also have to hold tremendous suffering and tragedy in our communities. That is also part of our jobs. But I want to see a world that is equitable and where everyone thrives. And when I talk about equity, I believe that structural racism is one of the biggest barriers to everything good that we want for the world. And that includes getting an actual representative democracy. It's not just about women, but it's also about people of color. It's about anyone who does not fit the dominant identity. And we have to start to reverse engineer those policies, those practices that have been in place forever that are maintaining these obstacles to people getting these opportunities."

This discussion was part of the Bay Area Women in Politics Oral History Project, which highlights the work of women leaders in the Bay Area. "We really wanted to think about this project as a way to document the history of our region's political women, from elected officials to activists to campaign staffers to fundraisers," said Amanda Tewes, a historian and interviewer for the Oral History Center who is leading the project. "I think we can all agree that women are often the backbone of America's political work — and we felt it was important to record that."

Listen to the discussion and a read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Joyce Carol Oates on her dystopian novel 'Hazards of Time Travel' Aug 07, 2020

Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 70 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, joined Poet Laureate and Berkeley English professor Robert Hass in March 2019 to discuss her 2018 book Hazards of Time Travel.

Set in a dystopian America in 2039, the novel tells the story of a 17-year-old who, after her subversive valedictorian speech, is exiled to rural Wisconsin in 1959.

"It seems like dystopian novels are mostly about extrapolating scary political trends in the present into the future," said Hass. "1984. The Handmaid's Tale. It felt like you found yourself more interested in exploring 1959."

"Or the sort of foundation for the present," replied Oates, a professor emerita of humanities at Princeton University who has taught as a visiting professor of English at Berkeley. "... Because when I wrote the novel — I was working on it in 2011 — I had no idea at all, as none of us did, that we would have a different kind of political situation today.

"... My novel was written before the campaign of 2016, which was a vicious and wildly divisive campaign from which we will probably never recover. No, I was actually looking ahead toward a surveillance state, which doesn't have that populist personality demagogue, who's like a clown, a sadistic clown, who's very vicious and funny in an ignorant way, playing to the populous.

"In my vision, it's more of a surveillance state, where the government is actually impersonal, and you never see a personality. ... It's more like, it's just all around us. We'e in a mesh, a web, of being surveyed and recorded all the time."

This conversation was part of Berkeley Book Chats, a series presented by the Townsend Center that features faculty members discussing recently completed publications, performances or recordings.

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Why racial equity belongs in the study of economics Jul 24, 2020

"Economists begin with this notion of the free market invisible hand, and we need to be clear that the hand has a color — it's a white hand, let me say, a white male hand," said Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University. ... I was a major in sociology and economics... I ended up choosing sociology, in part because of the foundation of economics is assumptions about the rational actor making decisions on a cost-benefit basis in something called efficient market. And we all know that the Homo sapiens — they're a complex animal shaped by multiple social forces and group divisions."

Bonilla-Silva joined a panel of scholars — Daina Ramey Berry, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Arjumand Siddiqi, a professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Toronto; and Mario Small, a sociology professor at Harvard University — for a discussion on July 13, 2020, about how the conceptual approaches of economics discount Black and Latinx perspectives, and what they think economics could learn from other disciplines. The discussion was moderated by Sandy Darity, a professor of economics, public policy and African and African American studies at Duke University.

This talk was sponsored by UC Berkeley's Department of Economics and Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, co-founded by Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman.

Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News.

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Thelton Henderson on the bravery to do what's right Jul 17, 2020

“I’ve seen a huge capacity for redemption from people… if given a chance.” That’s Thelton Henderson, a renowned civil rights lawyer who spent 37 years as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in conversation with Savala Trepczynski in a 2017 podcast series, Be the Change.

Be the Change was created and hosted by Trepczynski, the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at Berkeley Law. The series highlights people who Trepcyznski says “embody, and therefore model, a progressive and subversively compassionate way of being a human being.”

Henderson, who graduated from Berkeley Law in 1962, was the first African American lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the early 1960s. In the interview, he shares what it was like working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in the South, investigating local law enforcement and human rights abuses, and how the bravery he saw at the time inspired his work as a judge.

Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Can you imagine a future without police? Jul 10, 2020

This Berkeley Talks episode features an interview on Who Belongs?, a podcast by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Host Marc Abizeid, joined by co-host Erfan Moradi, talk with Erin Kerrison, an assistant professor of social welfare at Berkeley, about why she thinks the U.S. needs to dismantle capitalism and police, and build a new system free of crime and punishment.

"What is deemed illegal is not necessarily harmful — there's a whole lot of stuff that wreaks havoc in people's lives that is not illegal, that is not criminal," said Kerrison. "So, that sort of construction, that needs to be thrown out immediately ... when I say there's a possibility that we don't have to have crime, it's so true. It's so true because it's a construct. If we didn't have crime as such, because communities were stronger, then yeah, we wouldn't need police because police respond to crime, which is, in large part, a symptom of much, much bigger and deeper social and structural ills."

(Photo by risingthermals via Flickr)

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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How higher ed is transforming during the pandemic Jul 03, 2020

The switch to remote learning, triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, is realigning several education fundamentals. In this talk, top leaders at UC Berkeley — Chancellor Carol Christ; Bob Jacobsen, dean of undergraduate studies; and Rich Lyons, chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer — discuss how Berkeley is challenging convention in its new approach to instruction and learning, and consider what the implications for higher education are likely to be.

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Fighting racism: How to restructure society so it's open to all Jun 26, 2020

"Now, some would like us to believe that racism can be cured pharmacologically," said Amani Allen, executive associate dean at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "One major problem with this argument is that it suggests that racism is primarily facilitated through individual actors, and if we can just fix those bad people, everything will be fine. Well, racism, I would argue, won’t be cured by a pill. And that’s because what we’re talking about is systemic."

On June 9, 2020, Allen joined epidemiologist and civil rights activist Camara Jones, a 2019-20 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, in the first of a webinar series by the American Public Health Association that examines racism and its historic present-day impact on health and well-being.

In their talk, "Racism: The ultimate underlying condition," Jones began by defining racism as a two-sided open/closed sign, and how those on the open side might not recognize that the other side says "closed."

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Journalist Nahal Toosi on national security reporting under Trump Jun 19, 2020

"One myth I think that increasingly people are realizing, and I think Trump has accelerated this, is that national security is really about military and crime," said Politico reporter Nahal Toosi at a UC Berkeley event in March. ...I think what we're learning increasingly is that it's about the economy. It's about cyber issues. It's about climate. It's about migration. It's about the coronavirus.

"...I'm having to work with our health reporters because we're realizing these things are all coming together. So, it's not just about war and it's not just about the FBI or whatever. It's all these other things that have to work together."

Toosi joined professor Mark Danner at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism on March 2, 2020, to discuss what it's been like working as a foreign affairs correspondent during the Trump administration.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Using peer pressure to fight climate change Jun 12, 2020

In adopting a different diet or driving less, a person has an effect on the planet, says Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University. But not for the reason they might think.

"If you don't do it, the world will be the same as if you do it," said Frank, who spoke at UC Berkeley in January. "But the effect you have through your own actions are only a small fraction of the total effect you have because when you do something, other people see you do it, and they do it, too."

Frank, author of the 2020 book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, joined Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at Berkeley, at the campus's Goldman School of Public Policy on Jan. 28, 2020, to discuss how he sees peer pressure as a powerful tool to fight climate change.

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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America wants gun control. Why doesn't it have it? Jun 05, 2020

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian, in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020.

"Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continues, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the American narrative, and the inability of gun control advocates to develop a counter-narrative. ... When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force and power, a broad atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than narrower rational arguments to contain it."

Listen to the lecture and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Detail of a mural by Kyle Holbrook and local youth in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Terence Faircloth via Flickr)

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Thirty-six questions to help us connect when we're apart May 29, 2020

For the first week of quarantine during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Vitali-DeCola's 82-year-old dad, Joe DeCola, seemed upbeat.

"He was like, 'I got my dinner and I have this beautiful bouquet of flowers.' He just sounded, like, tucked-in and content."

DeCola has stage 4 lung cancer. He's become accustomed to isolating himself from time to time, especially during flu season. But after a few months sheltering in place this time around, his daughter said it started to get harder for him. "...He said, 'I’m feeling so lonely. I’m just really, really lonely.'”

That's why Vitali-DeCola, a teacher who has been staying at home with her husband and son in Brooklyn, while her dad is all by himself in Manhattan, decided to do a happiness practice by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center called "36 Questions for Increasing Closeness." She recently joined host Dacher Keltner on the Science of Happiness podcast to discuss her experience.

Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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The global politics of waste May 22, 2020

"All waste is global," said Kate O'Neill, a professor in the the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, at a campus event in February. "What we throw away has value. What we throw away often travels the globe. And that's not just the things we know about like electronic wastes, but also plastics... and things like cars, used cars, secondhand cars, clothes, bikes — even discarded food — will actually travel to some other countries, someplace where it may or may not be used..."

O'Neill, author of the 2019 book Waste, gave a Feb. 5 lecture, sponsored by Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how the things we throw away go through entire lifecycles after we toss them. And she discusses how China's 2017 decision to stop importing paper and plastic scrap in the condition it had been has disrupted the global waste economy and changed how communities around the world recycle.

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Poet Laureate Robert Hass reads new collection ‘Summer Snow’ May 08, 2020

Robert Hass, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of English and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, read from Summer Snow — his first poetry collection since 2010 — on Feb. 6, 2020, at the Morrison Library's monthly event, Lunch Poems.

Geoffrey O'Brien, a Berkeley English professor and poet, introduced Hass: "He has a remarkable way of making a language that's tensile and full of prosodies, and yet still feels like down-home conversation that cats and dogs can understand," he said.

Hass read five poems — "The Grandfather's Tale," "Dancing," "First Poem," "Nature Notes in the Morning" and "Cymbeline."

Listen to full readings from Summer Snow and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Art Cullen on journalism and politics in the Corn Belt Apr 24, 2020

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, a family-run newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa, joined Berkeley Journalism professor and author Michael Pollan on Jan. 29, 2020, to discuss journalism in rural America, Trump and the farm vote, immigration, regenerative agriculture and the potential for farmers to sequester carbon to help curb climate change. In 2017, Cullen won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on polluted water, fertilizer runoff and powerful corporate agricultural interests.

The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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How the real estate industry undermined black homeownership Apr 10, 2020

In 1968, following a wave of urban uprisings, politicians worked to end the practice of redlining by passing the Housing and Urban Development Act. While the act was meant to encourage mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat black homebuyers equally, the disaster that came after revealed that racist exclusion hadn’t been eradicated, but rather transformed into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.

On Jan. 24, 2020, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, discussed her new book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,as part of the Matrix Lecture series at UC Berkeley. Her book, which covers the time period from the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act to the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, exposes how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned.

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Naomi Klein on eco-facism and the Green New Deal Mar 27, 2020

"...At this very moment in our history, the men rising to the highest office in country after country... are full-fledged planetary arsonists," said Naomi Klein at a Berkeley Journalism event on Oct. 24, 2019.

"They are pouring fuels on these fires with defiance. We have Trump rolling back every environmental law conceivable, cracking open public lands to unrestricted drilling and fracking, trolling Greta [Thunberg] on Twitter, ogling Greenland for the fossil fuels now available under the melting ice. But this is not just about Trump, this is a global phenomenon..."

Klein, author of the book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal and the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, discussed with journalism lecturer Mark Schapiro the need for a fundamental transformation of our economy and politics as climate disruptions accelerate.

Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Deirdre Cooper Owens on gynecology’s brutal roots in slavery Mar 13, 2020

On Feb. 21, 2020, Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Nebraska, was on campus to discuss her work tracing the origins of medical racism back to its roots. In her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the origins of American Gynecology, Cooper Owens reveals the ways the field of gynecology, pioneered by 19th century medical men, was deeply intertwined with the institution of slavery.

This talk was part of 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, a yearlong initiative at Berkeley that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.

Read a Q&A with Cooper Owens on Berkeley News.

Read a transcript of this podcast episode on Berkeley News.

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Poetry and the Senses: 'Emergency is not separate from us' Feb 28, 2020

"During global climate crisis, we need more writing in and through water," read poet Indira Allegra at UC Berkeley earlier this month. "This is the perspective through which we must contextualize ourselves. The downward squint into saltwater mysteries or the movement of light across the surface of freshwater above. Emergency is not separate from us. We have to partner it. We must find ways in our mythologies and in our language to partner disaster."

Allegra, whose work has been featured in exhibitions at the Arts Incubator in Chicago and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, joined Chiyuma Elliott, an assistant professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and Lyn Hejinian, who teaches in the Department of English, in reading their poems on Feb. 4, 2020, as part of Poetry and the Senses, a two-year initiative by Berkeley's Arts Research Center that will explore the "relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness and resistance."

Addressing this year's theme of "emergency," the three poets touched on a range of topics, including natural disasters, police brutality, the meaning of borders and gun violence.

"My uncle Jim was murdered in 2000, along with his girlfriend and her daughter and an older couple," read Elliott from a poem called "On Skipping a Funeral." "Jim was collateral damage in a botched extortion scheme. He died in his sleep and the others were not so lucky. It took me about 10 years before I could even start to write poems about this. Each week, almost 700 people in the U.S. die from gun violence. A lot of people, a lot of families, wrestling with the long reverb of violence and of preventable death."

Learn more about Poetry and the Senses on Berkeley's Arts Research Center's website.

Read a transcript and listen to the talk on Berkeley News.

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Journalist Jemele Hill on the intersection of sports and race Feb 15, 2020

On Jan. 23, 2020, Jemele Hill, a staff writer for the Atlantic and host of the podcast Jemele Hill is Unbothered, spoke at UC Berkeley's Cal Performances about her career at the intersection of sports, race and culture in the U.S. In conversation with with KALW's radio host and reporter, Hana Baba, Hill touched on the NFL and Colin Kaepernick, what it's like reporting on sports as a black woman and how her life changed after President Trump tweeted about her.

"I mean, the NFL owners are spineless," Hill told Baba. "And I knew Colin Kaepernick would never play in the NFL the moment Donald Trump said his name... One of the few things that a lot of people unfortunately agree with the president about is that Colin Kaepernick should not be taking a knee. So, he [Trump] knows every time he says his [Kaepernick's] name, that it is giving him a level of universal support ... that he's doesn't experience usually.

"And so, what does that say about people in this country? I'm also old enough to remember that we just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, commemorated him. And the same people I saw talking about how great Dr. King was for his nonviolent protest, are also the same people who think Colin Kaepernick doesn't deserve to play in the NFL? ... But the NFL, as we have seen in the case with Muhammad Ali, as we have seen the case in a lot of history, 20 years from now, they'll be telling a different story. They'll act like all of this never happened."

Read the transcript and listen to the conversation on Berkeley News.

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Denise Herd and Waldo Martin on Berkeley's '400 Years' initiative Feb 07, 2020

In this episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast by UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, Berkeley professors Denise Herd and Waldo Martin discuss 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, a yearlong initiative that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.

"The commemoration of the 400th anniversary of slavery — it's part of a national initiative to recognize this long and really, really important time in our history," says Herd, a professor in the School of Public Health and associate director of the Othering and Belonging Institute who is leading the campus initiative. "... I think a strong impetus for bringing it here was that it resonates with the goals of really understanding social inequality and addressing social inequality."

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Film historian Harry Chotiner on the state of American cinema Jan 31, 2020

Harry Chotiner, a film historian and an adjunct assistant professor at New York University, gave a lecture on Jan. 22, 2019, about film in the past year, from Hollywood blockbusters and indie favorites to the impact of the #MeToo movement, changes in the film academy and the Oscars. The lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

"The two things that I think are most importantly new are streaming and the #MeToo movement, and that's what I want to focus on," says Chotiner. "In terms of streaming, I would say we're sort of in the middle of the beginning of the streaming revolution. ... Streaming is the biggest threat to movie theaters since television came in in the 1950s. Last year, Netflix spent more money making movies than all the studios combined. That's stunning. That's shocking."

As for the #MeToo movement, he says it has created more gender and racial equality and inclusion, as well as safer working environments, in the film industry. But, he adds, there is still work to be done.

"By any measurable standard, sexual harassment has dropped drastically, and it's not just measurable standards, but impressionistic accounts," he says. "The experience of women working is drastically better. Doesn't mean it's all done and it's all great. It does mean #MeToo has rocked the entire studio system."

See Chotiner's list of the best films of 2019.

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Chilean novelist Isabel Allende on war, loss and healing Jan 25, 2020

"People say, 'Oh no, the institutions in the United States can support anything. We are safe.' No, beware. Nothing is safe. Nothing is forever. Everything can change. We have to be aware of that and be therefore very alert. I wouldn't say vigilant because the word vigilant has a double meaning, but alert."

That's Chilean author Isabel Allende in conversation with playwright Caridad Svich, who won a 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her adaptation of Allende's 1982 novel, The House of the Spirits. The play, presented by UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies in spring 2019, tells the story of a family that spans three generations and a century of violent change in an unnamed Latin American country.

The conversation, part of Berkeley Arts and Design's public lecture series, was held on April 25, 2019, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). It was moderated by Michael Moran, who directed the Berkeley production.

During the talk, Allende discussed how she grew up in Chile, where she and her family lived through the 1973 military coup, then fled to Venezuela as refugees. While living in Venezuela, Allende felt sick with nostalgia for her country and the family she left behind. And she was also in pain knowing that people — her friends and family — were dying in Chile. Writing, she says, helped her process her grief and begin to heal.

Read the transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Paul Butler on how prison abolition would make us all safer Jan 17, 2020

The United States now locks up more people than almost any country in the history of the world, and by virtually any measure, prisons have not worked, said Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University, during a UC Berkeley lecture in October. Instead, Butler advocates abolishing prisons and finding alternative ways to deal with those who cause harm — something that he says would create a safer, more just society.

"Prison has been a miserable failure," said Butler, also a legal analyst on MSNBC. "It doesn't work. Most young people who come home from prison wind up right back there within two years. Prisons themselves are horrible places. They're violent, they stink, they're dangerous, they're noisy. It's really hard to leave a space like that better than when you came in."

Butler, author of the 2017 book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, gave a talk called "Prison Abolition, and a Mule" on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of UC Berkeley's Jefferson Memorial Lectures, sponsored by the Graduate Division. It was also part of the campus's yearlong initiative, 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Consciousness guide on using psychedelics as medicine Jan 10, 2020

"The purpose of medicine is to create a bigger, deeper, more thorough experience of our inner functioning, our physical functioning, our emotional functioning, our energetic functioning, our spiritual functioning, our relational functioning, how we are with the land," said author and consciousness guide Françoise Bourzat. "... Mushrooms bring it to your face, like, 'This is your illness.' By knowing your illness, you resolve your illness, you deal with it, you treat it from within yourself. The mushroom helps you see the truth."

Bourzat, author of Consciousness Medicine, gave a talk on Nov. 14 at UC Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside an exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which ran from March 15 to Dec. 15. Bourzat, a counselor who is trained in somatic psychology, has been mentored in the Mexican Mazatec tradition of the sacred mushrooms, and has been sharing her approach internationally for 30 years.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Artist Paul Chan on the 'Bather's Dilemma' Jan 03, 2020

On Oct. 29, artist Paul Chan delivered the 2019-20 Una's Lecture, a series sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities since 1987. In his talk, called the "Bather's Dilemma," Chan explores the figure of the bather — a visual trope with a rich history, and a prominent theme in his own work — as an embodiment of pleasure that is linked to the act of renewal.

"The bather in art history has a long and storied pedigree," says Chan. "What I was interested in was how this motif inspired a few artists to experiment with new ways to depict a human form that took into account movement in different ways.

"Thinking about bathers touched a nerve that was sensitive to a need I didn't realize was in me," he continues. "I needed some way to think about whether pleasure has a place in these punishing times and whether our capacity for pleasing and being pleased has any bearing on how we renew ourselves to better meet what genuine appeals of progress asks of us."

Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art. His art is held in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Professor Emerita Beverly Crawford on lies about migrants Dec 27, 2019

"If rights aren't enforced, do they really exist?" asks Beverly Crawford, a professor emerita of political science and international and area studies at UC Berkeley. "We can say, 'Yes, they exist,' but if they're not enforced, people can be treated as if their rights don't exist ... Once a person steps outside their own borders, let's say they're fleeing persecution, or they're fleeing poverty, or they're fleeing environmental crisis or disaster, they are rightless, as if their rights don't exist."

Crawford, former director of Berkeley's Center for European and German Studies, gave a lecture, "Lies about migrants: immigration policy in a time of post-truth politics," on Oct. 16, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). During the lecture, she discussed two problems in formulating immigration policy that leads to dehumanization — the absence of migrant rights and rival national identities. For example, in the U.S., there are rival definitions of what it means to be an American for American citizens. But, she says, it happens in other countries, too.

"What we have seen is the rise of the extreme right wing to dominate the narrative about immigration, both in the United States and in Europe," Crawford continues. "What's happened is, this extreme right, which dominates the narrative, has created a false narrative, and has turned to the weaponization of dehumanizing words and pictures to control the narrative based on people's fear and emotion, and the formulation of an exclusionist immigration policy. We don't have a comprehensive immigration law now."

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on overcoming the odds Dec 14, 2019

At 13, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote an article in her school paper about the importance of the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. But she didn't think about pursuing a career in law because she didn't see any women in the field.

When she began college at Cornell, however, she learned about how attorneys were defending people called in for questioning during the wave of Communist accusations led by Senator Joe McCarthy. In reading about their advocacy, "I got the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing," said Ginsburg at an Oct. 21 event at UC Berkeley.

Ginsburg, who, at 86, is the oldest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, gave Berkeley Law’s inaugural Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture to a packed house of Berkeley Law students, faculty and staff in Zellberbach Hall.

Ginsburg and Kay, who both graduated from law school in 1959, were trailblazers for women in the law and gender equality. They met at a conference on women in the law in 1971, and went on to co-author the first casebook on sex-based discrimination. They were good friends for decades before Kay, who taught for 57 years at Berkeley Law and was its first woman dean, died in 2017.

During the lecture, Ginsburg talks about the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field, how "overjoyed" she is that women are now welcomed at the bar and on the bench, how unconscious bias is still a problem — and the "zest for life" she has after having survived several bouts of cancer.

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley scholars on the politics and law of impeachment Dec 07, 2019

With the 2020 general elections looming, the nominee for the Democratic Party undetermined and a defiant and volatile president at the helm, the impeachment inquiry is heating up. At stake in this topsy-turvy political theater are our democratic institutions, which may be forever altered.

In this Nov. 5 talk for UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix event, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, and Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, discuss what the mechanisms are for removing or sanctioning a president of the United States, what are impeachable offenses and how it's no longer about left vs. right, but democracy vs. oligarchy.

(whitehouse.gov photo)

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Comedian Maz Jobrani on noticing the good in his life Nov 27, 2019

Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer."

Jobrani was recently a guest on the Science of Happiness, a podcast from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant.

"The reason I called my recent special Immigrant was because “immigrant” under Trump had turned into a bad word. It was a derogatory term. And really, people that that grasped onto that xenophobia, it broke my heart because I look around — first of all, I’m an immigrant. And then I look around and I know a lot of really good people that are immigrants, and then I’m looking at people like the Syrian refugees who are trying to come to America and flee hardship or the people come from Central America and I go, 'These people are leaving a really bad situation.' No one’s in a great situation is going, 'Oh we know the economy is great, there’s no violence in our country — let’s go somewhere where we don’t speak the language and we’re not wanted and see how it will go.’ No."

"That’s so true, Maz," says Keltner. "You know, what really strikes me about the immigrants who I am friends with and who I work with is not only their perseverance, but their ability to stay focused on the brighter side of human nature in spite of the rise of white supremacy and xenophobia in our country today."

In each episode of the Science of Happiness, a guest chooses a practice from the Science of Happiness free online course that’s been shown to increase happiness, connection and kindness. Jobrani chose a practice that focused on positivity — writing about three good things. When Jobrani got the assignment, he was on vacation with his wife and two kids in Japan, so the whole family participated. Each day, they would take 10 minutes to write down three good things, then they'd read what they wrote aloud to each other. It's something that Jobrani says encouraged them to look for positive things throughout the day.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on defending DACA Nov 22, 2019

An important case of the current U.S. Supreme Court term is about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — a program that some 700,000 undocumented people depend on for the right to work and protection from deportation — and whether or not it was properly ended by the Trump administration in 2017. The program has been kept in place since then by federal court injunctions. The Supreme Court heard argument in these cases on Nov. 12.

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and attorney Ethan Dettmer of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher's in San Francisco are key members of the litigation team that won one of the court injunctions, and are currently defending the program in the Supreme Court. In this Nov. 18 talk, they discuss what it's like litigating a case like this and the Supreme Court arguments that happened last week.

Related Berkeley News content:

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris on the health impacts of childhood stress Nov 15, 2019

Nadine Burke Harris, named the first surgeon general of California in January, has seen how childhood stress and trauma leads to declining health in adulthood. She began studying the correlation as a pediatrician years ago, and continued her research as medical director of the Bayview Child Health Center in San Francisco and founder of the Center for Youth Wellness.

"I believe, fundamentally, that social determinants of health are to the 21st century what infectious disease was to the 20th century," Harris told Berkeley Public Health Dean Michael Lu during the school's Dean's Speaker Series event on Sept. 26.

As surgeon general, Harris is leading the state's efforts to implement routine screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences, known as ACEs, among California's Medicaid population.

ACEs, explained Harris, are experiences — abuse, homelessness, losing a caregiver — that lead to health issues later in life, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes. The more ACEs a person has, she said, the more at risk they are.

"When we recognize that childhood adversity is a common root cause," she said, "it gives us really powerful insight into some of the most urgent issues of our day, specifically when we understand that cumulative adversity has an impact on our stress response system. And that impacts our later risk of heart disease. It helps us understand that when a black boy is walking down the street and get stopped, the more times it is activated, the greater the risk to the youth."

Harris ended her talk with her goal and a call to action: "In my role as state surgeon general, it’s my intention to lay the infrastructure to ensure that, in the state of California, we will cut ACEs in half in one generation. And y’all are going to help me with that.”

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law's Ian Haney López on defeating racial fearmongering Nov 08, 2019

People across the country, from presidential hopefuls and engaged voters to journalists and activists, are grappling with how to think and talk about racism in American politics.

In this Oct. 11 talk, Berkeley Law professor Ian Haney López, one of the nation's leading thinkers on how racism has evolved in the U.S. since the civil rights era, discusses his new book, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections and Saving America, offering insight and hopeful new strategy for defeating the right's racial fearmongering and achieving bold progressive goals.

"... Republicans have been saying for 50 years, 'Democrats only care about people of color.' And now, whenever folks hear a conversation about race, about racial justice, they immediately default to a frame, 'This is racial justice? That's for people of color.' We need to say expressly, 'Racial justice? That's for white folks, too.'

"Whites need to hear that they will benefit from being part of a multiracial coalition ... When we tested this message with communities of color, they had far more confidence in a multiracial coalition when we said, 'Whites will benefit,' because that told people of color, 'Oh, this isn't just kumbaya and we're all going to do this because we should.' This is, 'White folks need to save their families, and to save their families, they've got to work with us.' And once they know that, people of color say, 'Yes, this might work. This might work.'"

This talk was organized as part of a series of events under the banner of the 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice initiative, UC Berkeley’s yearlong commemoration marking the anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in the English colonies in 1619. The initiative was launched in the spirit of the 400 Years of African American History Commission Act, federal legislation signed last year that acknowledged the impact of slavery in the United States and called for a national commission to help support events around the country to commemorate the anniversary.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Learn about upcoming 400 Years events on the Haas Institute's website.

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Author Andrew Marantz on the hijacking of the American conversation Nov 01, 2019

To write his new book, ANTISOCIAL: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, New Yorker reporter Andrew Marantz spent three years embedded with alt-right trolls to better understand how they had become powerful enough to influence our politics, our media — our society as a whole.

“I suppose I could have sat around and simply had an opinion, but I really wanted to know where these toxic ideas were coming from, what motivates people to do this and how they were promoting these ideas,” Marantz told Berkeley Newsearlier this month.

Marantz joined Chancellor Carol Christ, Ed Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, and moderator Dan Mogulof, at UC Berkeley’s Alumni House on Oct. 16 to discuss the trends and discoveries described in his book.

“The thing that surprised me about the book is how nihilistic and punk and really without convictions … a lot of these people were,” said Chancellor Christ said to Marantz during the discussion. “They were really basically driven by a desire for followers and notoriety rather than the horrible convictions that they said. Was that your take on it? Because that’s certainly what I took from the book. And that was actually as troubling to me as the virus of these hate sites.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” said Marantz. “There’s a spectrum in the book from sincere ideologues to, as you say, nihilists, who don’t really seem to have any ideological agenda, but seem to have just a pure self-interest. Or, even self-interest is maybe generous, because all they want is attention. But it can be negative attention. It doesn’t really seem to matter to them. So, both of those areas existed within the taxonomy. And I agree, it’s hard to see which one is worse. Because, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism — at least it’s an ethos. You can work with an ideology, it’s hard to know how to work with a nihilist.”

Christ first met Marantz in 2017, when he was working on a New Yorker story about free speech issues on campus, after the cancellation of an event with then-Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos led to a wave of criticism that Berkeley — home of the Free Speech Movement — had tried to shut down free speech.

“When I was here covering the Milo circus,” said Marantz, “the underlying premise was, ‘This is a public university, therefore, the First Amendment applies, therefore, he has to be able to speak.’ …What I’m questioning is whether that should be the interpretation of First Amendment law for time immemorial, or whether we can change our interpretations of laws just like we’ve always changed our interpretations of laws.”

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Biologist E.O. Wilson on how to save the natural world Oct 25, 2019

In this talk, renowned biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson joins former U.S. secretary of the interior and interim CEO of the Nature Conservancy Sally Jewell for a discussion about the core science and common humanity that is driving the success of Wilson's Half-Earth Project — "a call to protect half the land and sea in order to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis and ensure the longterm health of our planet." It's made up of a team of thought leaders from a wide range of fields who are gathering expertise from around the world to achieve this goal.

"We need to build a science," says Wilson. "We know that our ecosystems, which are really what we try to protect — not just single species, but ensembles of species that have come together and have reached stability, sometimes over thousands, or in some places, millions of years ... We need an ecosystems science. And there is going to be one created. It should be, has to be, in the immediate future. So since I'm in a preacher's mood, I will say to you: If you want to go into science, please consider going into the coming development of a new biological science."

E.O. Wilson spoke on Oct. 7, 2019, as part of the College of Natural Resources' Horace M. Albright Lecture in Conservation. It took place during the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation's Half-Earth Day, an annual event that explores how conservationists can make progress toward protecting half the earth for the rest of life. Half-Earth Day was held at UC Berkeley this year, and featured lectures, panels and workshops on education and citizen science, science and technology, conservation and community, and business and sustainability.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Journalist Maggie Haberman on reporting on the Trump White House Oct 18, 2019

The unrivaled political insight of reporter Maggie Haberman makes her one of today’s most influential voices in national affairs journalism. In this talk, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist offers a riveting look into the Trump White House, the current political waters and the changing perceptions of journalism across the country.

"What Trump does with that language, which comes with a real degree of danger, in part for the obvious, but in part because his fans don’t realize that some of this is a game for him, and how much he truly has fed off of and enjoys the mainstream media attention," says Haberman. "He still brags to his friends that he’s on the front page of the Times more now than he ever was before he was elected. They have told me they detect a note of pride in his voice. Not everything that Trump is doing is new or something unseen before in U.S. presidential politics, including his attempts to influence how the press does its job. Reporters cannot lose sight of that. He is extreme, but aspects of what he does are not unique."

Haberman spoke at Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, Oct. 6, as part of Cal Performances’ 2019–20 Speaker Series, a season-long series of public presentations by some of the leading creative and intellectual voices of our time including David Sedaris, Dan Pfeiffer, David Pogue, Jemele Hill, Laverne Cox and Jad Abumrad — thinkers, activists, strategists, satirists, journalists and pioneers at the leading edge of culture and politics.

Maggie Haberman covered New York City Hall for the New York Daily News, the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign and other political races for the New York Post, and wrote about national affairs as a senior reporter for Politico. She and her team at the New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their coverage of the Trump administration and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, as well as the Aldo Beckman Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association. Her stories about covering a contentious administration offer a revealing insider’s look at what is sure to be known as our country’s most explosive era of modern journalism.

Ed Wasserman, dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, moderated questions from the audience following Haberman’s presentation.

Learn more about Cal Performances' speaker series.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Barbara Simons on election hacking and how to avoid it in 2020 Oct 11, 2019

"There are a number of myths about elections that we've been hearing, saying that they are secure. And I want to shoot down two of those key myths," says Barbara Simons, board chair of Verified Voting, in a talk called "Can we recover from an attack on our election?" that she gave for the annual Minner Distinguished Lecture in Engineering Ethics on Sept. 18.

The first myth, says Simons, is that because voting machines are never connected to the internet, they can't be hacked. The second is that there are so many types of voting systems that it's impossible to rig an election. She explains why both are untrue.

She goes on to discuss how, in 2002, computers were introduced in U.S. elections without an analysis of the risks, how it led to states adopting paperless voting and what we need to do to avoid hacking in our 2020 presidential election.

"We have a solution, so that's the good news," says Simons. "We have a solution. You need voter-marked paper ballots. You need a strong chain of custody. And you need to physically sound, manually post-election ballot audits called risk-limiting audits."

She says it's too late to have any laws passed in time for the 2020 election. Instead, we need the cooperation of local election officials and a national campaign. And, she says, it's up to volunteers and staff to help the election officials do risk-limiting audits. "If we can do that, there's a good chance we can avoid hacking of the 2020 election. But that's a big 'if.'"

Simons is the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the nation’s largest educational and scientific computing society. An expert on electronic voting, she is the co-author of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? and has been on the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission since 2008.

The Minner Distinguished Lecture in Engineering Ethics is an annual lecture supported by the Minner Endowment, a gift from Berkeley Engineering alumnus Warren Minner and his wife, Marjorie.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

Watch a video of Simons' talk on Berkeley Engineering's website.

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Nobel laureate Randy Schekman on new Parkison's research Oct 04, 2019

On Sept. 17, UC Berkeley hosted the second annual Aging, Research, and Technology Innovation Summit, a daylong event that brought together researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health care workers to tackle some of the biggest questions in aging research. This year’s summit focused on the challenge of understanding and treating neurodegenerative diseases.

Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He spoke at the summit about Parkinson's disease — what we already know about the disease and new research efforts that are underway.

"We have experienced a pandemic in Parkinson's disease," he told the audience. "The incidence ... is increasing dramatically in spite of the fact that the disease was first recognized and reported by clinical symptoms 200 years ago. As the population inexorably ages, we are experiencing a wave of this disease which inexorably takes the lives of those who are afflicted."

Schekman, whose wife died from the disease two years ago, went on to describe a new collaborative research initiative — Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP). Led by Schekman, ASAP was created by the Milken Institute Center for Strategic Philanthropy with support from the Sergey Brin Family Foundation to better understand the underlying causes of Parkinson's disease.

"We want to know where the disease begins, what the molecules and cells and neural circuits that are affected primarily by the disease, and then how it progresses," he said. "Much of the research that gone on in the clinic has been valuable and important, but there are no cures. ... Many of us feel that what we really need to do is get into the laboratory to understand these basic processes."

ASAP's first journal article, "Point of View: Coordinating a new approach to basic research into Parkinson's disease," was published on Sept. 25 in the open-access journal, eLife.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Justice Elena Kagan on taking risks, finding common ground Sep 27, 2019

"Law students are too risk-averse. There's too much planning and too little jumping in. You should experiment." That's U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in conversation with Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on Monday, Sept. 23 in Zellerbach Hall.

"I think sometimes people look at my resume like mine, and they think, 'Oh, it's just like this golden life.' What you're seeing are the jobs I got. What you're not seeing are all the jobs I didn't get ... when a door closes, a window opens. Sometimes the things that you think you wanted, it turns out that you're better off not getting them."

Kagan began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel and later as policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. She then became a professor at Harvard Law School, and in 2003 was named its dean, its first woman dean. In 2009, she became Solicitor General of the United States, the officer responsible for representing the federal government before the Supreme Court. And in 2010, President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court itself to fill the vacancy arising from the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens.

During the conversation, Kagan discussed the mutual respect among justices and their shared passion for the law.

"I find it perplexing that you can’t like someone you disagree with, even on important matters,” she added. “I was extremely close to Justice Scalia, and spent the past few days writing a foreword for a book of his opinions. I like all my colleagues and feel close to many of them. There’s more to people than what they think about issues.”

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Admissions director Femi Ogundele on what makes a Berkeley student Sep 20, 2019

“If you’re looking for an opportunity to make a real change in this society, you need to go and work at a public school,” said Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of Admissions, Femi Ogundele, on Wednesday, Aug. 30, at this fall semester's first Campus Conversations, a series where top Berkeley leaders discuss campus issues and take questions from staff, faculty and students.

In an hour-long conversation, Ogundele, who started his post in January, talked about why he came to Berkeley, the power of strong messaging and targeted outreach and how the Chancellor's Diversity Initiative is an opportunity to "reimagine and reengage" students who haven't necessarily been engaged in in the past.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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john powell on rejecting white supremacy, embracing belonging Sep 05, 2019

On Friday, Aug. 30, UC Berkeley held a symposium that marked the start of a yearlong initiative, "400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Oppression," commemorating the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies with a daylong symposium. It drew hundreds of attendees who heard from more than a dozen historians and social scientists about the impact and legacy of slavery in society today.

In his keynote speech to close the symposium, john powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and professor of law, African American studies and ethnic studies, discussed the link between slavery and white supremacy. Slavery, he said, created anti-black racism, which was necessary for the extraction of capital.

“It was never about, ‘I don’t like you because you’re different, because you have more melanin than me.’ It was about capital. It was about the U.S. industrializing … It was about the elites trying to figure out how to extract as much capital as possible and using people and people’s land to do that. Slavery is about America,” he said.

Read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.

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We need a digital infrastructure that serves humanity, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci Aug 26, 2019

Since the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, reports of hate speech targeting various minority groups have risen dramatically. Although this surge is well-reported, it remains difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem or even properly classify hate speech, let alone identify and measure its effects. Keyword searches and dictionary methods are often imprecise and overly blunt tools for detecting the nuance and complexity of hate speech. Without the tools to identify, quantify, and classify hate speech, we cannot even begin to consider how to address its causes and consequences.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century, discusses hate speech research being conducted at UC Berkeley through the Social Sciences D-Lab, focusing on corporate responsibility and the importance of preserving free speech.

This talk was the keynote lecture for the spring 2019 Digital Humanities Fair, which showcases recent scholarship in the digital humanities and hosts a campuswide conversation on the state of the field. Learn more about the Digital Humanities at Berkeley.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Take an intoxicating plants tour at UC Botanical Garden Aug 16, 2019

Sal Levinson, who works on native propagation at the UC Botanical Garden, led a tour on July 9, 2019, about the plants people have used to heal pain, cause pain, bring pleasure, celebrate the sacred and symbolize faith. From the Cycad, a poisonous plant that the dinosaurs ate and some people have learned how to eat, to California native rye, a type of grass that gets a fungus called ergot that has been used to treat migraine headaches.

"Ergot is effective for stopping bleeding," Levinson tells a group of 20 on the tour. "The wise women in ancient times would commonly use it after childbirth. Some women would start bleeding out after childbirth, and if they used this drug, they could stop the bleeding and save the women."

This walk was hosted in conjunction with the current exhibit on view at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription, Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances.

Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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How an 'awe walk' helped one musician reconnect with her home Aug 09, 2019

In the "Science of Happiness" podcast episode, "Finding awe in every step," musician and activist Diana Gameros talks about how she moved to the U.S. from Mexico at 13, and the heartbreak that came with it. She spent years writing about longing to go home to Juarez, Mexico, and the experience of undocumented immigrants in America.

"When I moved to the United States, I found inspiration or I found this motivation to write about the things that I was feeling about being away and I think, you know, I was inspired by folk music to create these songs," Gameros tells host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.

"For me, it’s very humbling to know that some of the stories and the messages I give, or that I sing about, are resonating with other people whose stories are similar to mine," Gameros continues. "And I began to notice that they became a source of inspiration and of empowerment to them. And so I also see it as a as a responsibility to use my platform. I have a microphone. I have an audience. I have a stage. And so, for me it’s a way to give voice to those who don’t have a means to express it."

In each episode of "Science of Happiness," a guest chooses a practice from the Science of Happiness free online course from the Greater Good Science Center that's been shown to increase happiness, connection and kindness. Gameros chose the Awe Walk, which she did both in California and Mexico, where she recently visited for the first time in 16 years.

Listen to more episodes of "Science of Happiness" at https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Artwork by Whitney Anderson)

Read a transcript onBerkeley News.

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Economist Samuel Bowles on why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens Aug 05, 2019

It is widely held today on grounds of prudence — if not realism — that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let Homo economicus be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Samuel Bowles, a research professor and director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, explains why this is so, using evidence from behavioral experiments mechanism design and other sources, and proposes an alternative paradigm for policy making.

Sponsored by UC Berkeley's Graduate Division, Bowles gave this lecture on Feb. 25, 2019, as part of the Barbara Weinstock Lectures on the Morals of Trade.

(Santa Fe Institute photo)

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Music historian David James on cinema's dance with popular music Jul 26, 2019

In his book Rock ’n’ Film: Cinema’s Dance with Popular Music, music historian David James explores how rock’s capacity for cultural empowerment and its usefulness as a driver of commerce and profit have been reproduced in various kinds of cinema: independent documentaries and concert films including Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter; narrative films, such as King Creole and Privilege; and the experimental cinema of artists, like Kenneth Anger.

In a June 22, 2019, lecture at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), James explored the rich legacy of cinema’s dance with popular music. Illustrating his talk with clips from classic rock films like Blackboard Jungle, A Hard Day’s Night, and many others, James shared with his BAMPFA audience how rock music was distinctive from other cultural developments of its era because of its multiracial appeal, anticipating and helping to precipitate the utopian ideals of the civil rights era and other left-wing movements.

These transformative energies, James said, were channeled into a growing body of films that became important to the development of rock music — not just as delivery mechanisms of the new sound, but as engines for its production. Marquee musicians like Elvis and the Beatles found themselves able to experiment with new forms of creative expression in films that captured the exciting and transgressive spirit of their musical moment.

James’ lecture was delivered in conjunction with an ongoing film series at BAMPFA inspired by his work, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, which runs through Aug. 31. For more information, visit bampfa.org/program/its-only-rock-n-roll.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Joel Moskowitz on the health risks of cell phone radiation Jul 19, 2019

As of 2017, there were more than 273 million smartphones in use in the country and 5 billion subscriber connections worldwide.

“This is a big, big business,” says Joel Moskowitz, the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health at the School of Public Health. “This is an industry that’s probably been unparalleled by any other industry in the world, in terms of reach.”

Moskowitz gave a talk last spring called “Cell Phones, Cell Towers and Wireless Safety” for Be Well at Work, a University Health Services program at UC Berkeley.

Moskowitz, who has conducted research on disease prevention programs and policies for more than 30 years, says that with the influx of smartphones has come hundreds of thousands of cell towers. These towers receive and transmit radio frequencies called microwaves — the same waves used in microwave ovens.

In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic to humans, based on studies of cell phone radiation and brain tumor risk in humans.

“Currently, we have considerably more evidence that would work a stronger classification,” says Moskowitz, an adviser to the International EMF Scientist Appeal signed by more than 240 scientists who publish peer-reviewed research on electromagnetic radiation. “Many scientists today feel that it’s time for IARC to re-review the literature given all the research that’s been published since 2011 to upgrade this to at least probably carcinogenic to humans, if not actually carcinogenic.”

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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What can be done to protect pollinators Jul 12, 2019

California's agriculture has been impacted by dwindling bee populations. In this episode of Just Food, a podcast from the Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley, experts discuss what farms can do in response — not only to protect honeybees, but also to restore native pollinator species.This episode was originally published in September 2017.

This episode features:

Colin Muller, a beekeeper at Muller Ranch
Claire Kremen, professor of environmental science in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley
Paul Muller, part owner of Full Belly Farm

This podcast was produced by the Berkeley Food Institute in partnership with the UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute at the Graduate School of Journalism.

See photos and listen to more episodes of the Just Food podcast.

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#SandraBlandMystery: Aaminah Norris on the transmedia story of police brutality Jul 06, 2019

Aaminah Norris is an assistant professor at Sacramento State in the College of Education. She has more than 20 years of experience supporting schools and nonprofit organizations in addressing issues of educational equity for low-income students from historically marginalized communities. She researches, teaches and advocates for the use of digital and social media in formal and informal learning environments to address racial and gender inequities.

Norris sat down with Abigail De Kosnik, an associate professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, in April 2019 to discuss transmedia storytelling, police brutality against women and girls of color and the essay she co-authored, #Sandra Bland's Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality."

“A lot of the work that I do is helping people to understand that they have a responsibility to disrupt media messages and not just consume,” Norris tells De Kosnik. “You can't just be thoughtless consumers of these things that reinforce bias against a group. And if you are doing that, then you can potentially be causing harm and putting people in danger.”

This conversation was featured in De Kosnik’s online course Performance, Television, and Social Media. It was designed and produced in collaboration with Digital Learning Services.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Virgie Tovar on ending fat phobia Jun 29, 2019

Writer, speaker and activist Virgie Tovar speaks with Savala Trepczynski, director of Berkeley Law's Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, about the process of divesting from diet and body image culture and investing in rehumanization, community building and a new vision for our lives.

"I do experience fat phobia in an interpersonal and social sense," Tovar tells Trepczynski. "Meaning that I've had the lifelong effects of, you know, constantly having my body policed by others. Every time I leave my house, I'm deeply aware that someone might say something to me that's really dehumanizing and stultifying. Because we're just in that environment where people feel the right to police and speak out violently against fat women, in particular."

"One thing that’s really important to me is to allow yourself to be angry. Anger is a really sacred practice and I think, for women, anger is one of the least feminine behaviors that we can do and so there’s a big taboo around anger. And this goes back to the idea that oftentimes, we will metabolize anger and we’ll turn it into shame and that’s just internally directed anger. And, I think it’s really important for women to actually be able to feel anger and express anger."

This interview was recorded for a 2017 summer podcast series,Be the Change, produced by the Berkeley Advanced Media Institute.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley artist Mildred Howard on the impact of gentrification in the Bay Area Jun 24, 2019

On Wednesday, June 19, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) celebrated Juneteenth — a national commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States — with a visit by Mildred Howard, a widely acclaimed artist and longtime Berkeley resident whose family has deep roots in the Bay Area’s African American community. Howard appeared at BAMPFA for a screening of the new documentary, Welcome to the Neighborhood, which highlights her own family’s history in South Berkeley and the neighborhood’s transformation over the past 50 years.

Following the screening of the 30-minute film, Howard was joined in conversation by Leigh Raiford, UC Berkeley associate professor of African American studies, and Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s director and chief curator. Their discussion touched on a range of topics, from South Berkeley’s ongoing struggles with gentrification, to the role of the university in supporting diverse communities, to Howard’s own work as an artist. Some of her works are on display in BAMPFA’s exhibition, About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging, which was curated by a UC Berkeley class co-taught by professor Raiford, and runs through July 21.

Directed by filmmaker Pam Uzzell, Welcome to the Neighborhood tells the story of Howard’s mother, Mabel Howard, who moved to the Bay Area during World War II and became an influential civic leader in South Berkeley’s African American community. Mildred Howard recalled her mother’s prominent role in fighting to preserve the fabric of her community, including her success in preventing BART from dividing the city with an above-ground rail line. This legacy continues to inspire a new generation of activists fighting for equality in Berkeley and beyond; as Howard put it, “as a black woman in the United States, social activism is in my DNA.”

Learn more about BAMPFA exhibition, About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging.

Read the transcript and listen to the talk on Berkeley News.

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'New York Times' editor on the future of fact-based journalism Jun 13, 2019

Dean Baquet is the executive editor of the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. In February 2019, he sat down with Edward Wasserman, dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, to discuss the 2016 elections and the future of fact-based journalism.

"I don't want to be a leader of the opposition to Donald Trump," he told Wasserman. "This is perhaps the hardest thing about navigating this era. A big percentage of my readers, and I hear from them a lot, want me to lead the opposition of Donald Trump. They don't quite say it that way, but what they say is, 'Why quote his tweets? Why go to his press conferences? Why not? Why not just call him a liar every day? Why not essentially just take him out and beat him up? What are you waiting for?' I think that would be the road to ruin, for a bunch of reasons. But, to me, the most powerful one is if you become the leader of the opposition, eventually the people who you're aligned with come to power, right?"

This conversation is featured on On Mic, a podcast by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It was produced by Luis Hernandez. For more conversations with writers, journalists and documentarians, check out other On Mic episodes. Technical facilities for On Mic are underwritten by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon on the butterfly politics of #MeToo Jun 07, 2019

"We are here in the middle of the first mass movement against sexual abuse in the history of the world," said Catharine MacKinnon, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, about the progress of the #MeToo movement. "This one sprung from the law of sexual harassment, quickly overtook it, and is shifting law, cultures, and politics everywhere. At the same time, electrifyingly demonstrating what I’m calling butterfly politics in action ... butterfly politics means that the right, small intervention in the structure of an unstable political system can ultimately produce systemic change. ... To ask what made #MeToo possible is to ask what, for the first time, made it harder to keep the sexual abuse inside than to put it out."

MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar who pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination in employment and education, spoke at a three-day Berkeley Law conference, "The Worldwide #MeToo Movement: Global Resistance to Sexual Harassment and Violence." The conference, which took place May 13-15, was attended by more than 200 women, leaders, scholars and activists attended the conference.

Learn more about the conference on Berkeley Law.

Read the transcript of this lecture on Berkeley News.

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Tanner Lectures, day 3: Commentators respond to Ripstein, discuss morality of war May 31, 2019

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.

In the last of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, commentators Chris Kutz, a law professor at UC Berkeley who focuses on moral, political and legal philosophy; Oona Hathaway, a professor law at Yale Law School; and Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, provide commentary on Ripstein’s previous two lectures.

“What’s puzzling is that Arthur seems to want to link up this principle to the idea of a future peace and internally to the principle of action by the aggressor,” said Kutz in his commentary. “The peace imagined by the aggressor nation isn’t the peace of a just defender, it’s a peace based upon forcible change. Now, Arthur seemed to suggest that there’s no coherent alternative to the just defender’s limited aims in war, that any other conception of war makes war a matter of what he called extermination. Even for an aggressor’s state, that seems to me an exaggerated characterization.”

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is presented annually at nine universities: UC Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. This series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist, Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. Tanner’s goal, in establishing the lectures through the Tanner philanthropies, was to promote the search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. He hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values, and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind.

Learn more about the 2019 Tanner Lectures.

Listen and read a transcript of this talk on Berkeley News.

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john powell on targeted universalism May 29, 2019

In this episode of Who Belongs, a podcast produced by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, we hear from john powell, director of the Haas Institute and a professor of law and African American studies at UC Berkeley.

In this interview, powell discusses a brand new primer the Haas Institute just published on the targeted universalism policy approach, a model conceptualized by professor powell. The primer was co-written by professor powell, along with assistant director Stephen Menendian and Wendy Ake, the director of the Just Public Finance program.

Targeted universalism is a platform to put into practice social programs that move all groups toward a universal policy goal. It supports the needs of the most marginalized groups, as well as those who are more politically powerful, while reminding everyone that we are all part of the same social fabric.

Download a copy of "Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice."

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley Talks.

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Tanner Lectures, day 2: Arthur Ripstein on why it's wrong to target civilians during war May 22, 2019

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.

In the second of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, Ripstein talks about why it's wrong to target civilians and makes a distinction between those who are and are not a part of war. Following the lecture, Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, and Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford, provide commentary.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is presented annually at nine universities: UC Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. This series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist, Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. Tanner’s goal, in establishing the lectures through the Tanner philanthropies, was to promote the search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. He hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values, and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

Learn more about the 2019 Tanner Lectures.

Stay tuned for the third installment of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Berkeley Talks.

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Tanner Lectures, day 1: Arthur Ripstein on rules for wrongdoers May 16, 2019

For the 2019 Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, Arthur Ripstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, argues that the very thing that makes war wrongful — the fact which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right — also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.

In the first of three days of lectures and discussions, which took place on April 9-11, Ripstein talks about the rules for wrongdoers. He says, "The thing that's wrong with war is war is the condition in which might makes right. Now, that doesn't mean that no one could every be justified in going to war, but it means that war is always morally problematic. It's morally problematic because who prevails in the war depends on strength and is entirely independent of the merits." Following the lecture, UC Berkeley law professor Christopher Kutz provided a commentary.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is presented annually at nine universities: UC Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. This series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist, Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. Tanner's goal, in establishing the lectures through the Tanner philanthropies, was to promote the search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. He hoped that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values, and contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind.

Read more about the 2019 Tanner Lectures.

Stay tuned for the second and third installments of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Berkeley Talks.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Kira Stoll and David Wooley on how California and UC are reducing carbon emissions May 11, 2019

Climate change is a pressing and urgent global issue and a challenge that needs planet- and human-focused solutions. The state has signed into law numerous policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emission from buildings, industrial processes, vehicles, agricultural and solid waste management, electric power and fossil fuel production and freight transport. Those policies are continuously evolving to reflect change in technology, markets and public opinion. UC Berkeley and the UC system have pledged to be carbon neutral from building and fleet energy use by 2025, and from transportation and other sources by 2050.

Kira Stoll, the director of sustainability at UC Berkeley, and David Wooley, a visiting professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and executive director of the Center for Environmental Public Policy, gave a talk on May 1, 2019, about what is underway in green building, energy efficiency, clean electricity, resource management and behavior-based programs, and how these can help meet these ambitious but achievable goals.

This lecture is part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Dr. Joe Tafur on the role of spiritual and emotional healing in modern healthcare May 02, 2019

Drawing from his first-hand experience at Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual, a traditional healing center near Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, Dr. Joe Tafur reviews the role of spiritual and emotional healing in modern healthcare.

Tafur gave a talk on April 18, 2019, for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.

In this talk, Tafur discusses how emotional trauma contributes to medical illness, and how spiritual healing techniques can lead to improvements in the mind and body. Ayahuasca shamanism and other psychedelic-assisted therapies may be effective, in some cases, because of their ability to induce relevant changes in epigenetic imprints associated with emotional trauma stored in the psychoneuroendocrine immunologic network, which Tafur theorizes is the physiologic manifestation of the emotional body.

Dr. Joe Tafur is a Colombian American family physician originally from Phoenix, Arizona. After completing his family medicine training at UCLA, Tafur spent two years in academic research at the UCSD Department of Psychiatry in a lab focused on mind-body medicine. After his research fellowship, over a period of six years, he lived and worked in the Peruvian Amazon at the traditional healing center Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual. There he worked closely with master Shipibo shaman Ricardo Amaringo and trained in ayahuasca shamanism.

In his new book, The Fellowship of the River: A Medical Doctor’s Exploration into Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine, Tafur shares his unique experience and integrative medical theories. He is now focused on his work with the nonprofit Modern Spirit and the Modern Spirit Epigenetics Project.

For upcoming events, visit the Heart Museum of Anthropology’s website.

Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Professor David Raulet on the revolution of cancer immunology Apr 24, 2019

The last eight years have seen a revolution in approved cancer treatments, based on the development of medicines that arouse our immune systems to attack and eliminate our own cancer cells. These breakthroughs in immunotherapy of cancer were based on a deep understanding of the immune system itself, coupled with the first direct evidence that immune responses that attack human cancers occur naturally, albeit weakly. The treatments amplify natural immune responses against cancer, and are effective in some types of cancer, leading to cures in many patients. They are less effective or not effective in many other types of cancer. The success has galvanized major new efforts by researchers and drug companies alike to develop complementary and more broadly effective medications to treat other types of cancer.

David Raulet, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, gave a lecture on April 10, 2019, about the revolution of cancer immunology. In this talk, Raulet describes how these medicines work, their current limitations and the prospects for novel and more effective immunotherapy approaches, including those based on research in the his laboratory.

This lecture is part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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**Cal Performances announces its 2019-20 season** Apr 24, 2019
On Thursday, April 18, 2019, Cal Performances’ board of trustees co-chairs Helen Meyer and Susan Graham, and executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen, announced the organization’s 2019-20 season, programmed by associate director Rob Bailis.
Hear Bailis in conversation about the season with Cy Musiker, a KQED radio news reporter, anchor and recently retired host of KQED's weekly arts showThe Do List. Musiker is an alumnus of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
Cal Performances' 2019-20 season showcases an exhilarating and expansive breadth of dance productions, from grand to intimate in scale, featuring a broad range of international performance traditions and starring renowned companies from the US and abroad in Zellerbach Hall, widely considered the finest concert dance venue on the west coast; virtuoso soloists and conductors making their Cal Performances debuts; and immersion in key bodies of work by Beethoven, Bartók and Liszt.
An interdisciplinary set of projects explores the artistic accomplishments of UC Berkeley faculty and alumni and Berkeley natives — with composers, scholars, writers, filmmakers and performers bringing new and recent work to campus. Dance and contemporary music ensembles perform Cal Performances co-commissioned work and the season concludes with a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission project staged in collaboration with lead commissioner Stanford Live. Artists and ensembles with meaningful, decades-long relationships with Cal Performances and Bay Area audiences return, and master performers from across the globe travel to Zellerbach Hall for presentations that revive and refresh traditional and contemporary music and dance practices.
Read a transcript and see photos on *Berkeley News.*
*(Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater photo by Andrew Eccles)*

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Professor Rucker Johnson on why school integration works Apr 18, 2019

Brown v. Board of Education was hailed as a landmark decision for civil rights. But decades later, many consider school integration a failure. UC Berkeley professor Rucker C. Johnson's new book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works shows the exact opposite is true. The book looks at decades of studies to show that students of all races who attended integrated schools fared better than those who did not. In this interview with Goldman School of Public Policy Dean Henry E. Brady, which took place on Jan. 9, 2019, Johnson explains how he and his team analyzed the impact of not just integration, but school funding policies and the Head Start program.

This lecture was recorded by UCTV, the UC Public Policy Channel.

The Goldman School of Public Policy, with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans, also produces a podcast, “Talk Policy To Me.”

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Rev. William J. Barber II: 'Forward together, not one step back' Apr 14, 2019

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is a pastor and social justice advocate building a broad-based grassroots movement, grounded in the moral tenets of faith-based communities and the constitution, to confront systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation, the war economy and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism in America today.

Barber delivered the closing keynote speech on April 10 at the 2019 Othering & Belonging conference, organized by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. The Othering & Belonging conferences are dynamic and uniquely curated events that aim to elevate work nationally and globally in "othering and belonging," a critical lens developed by the Haas Institute under the leadership of john a. powell for defining structural exclusion and inclusion, and an analytical and applied framework which we can use to design and advance institutions, narratives and policies that support a more fully inclusive “we.”

The 2019 conference highlighted models of bridging that give us examples of how to build and sustain a diverse, pluralistic society underpinned by a new, inclusive social compact where group-based difference and forms of identity — whether race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender, among others — are not dehumanized nor are they subsumed, but instead are celebrated and included in our imagined and real community.

Learn more about the Othering and Belonging conferences.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Jennifer Doudna on the future of gene editing Apr 11, 2019

Jennifer Doudna spoke at UC Berkeley's International House on Feb. 21, 2019, about the revolutionary gene-editing tool she co-invented, CRISPR-Cas9.

Our technological capacity to make changes to genomic data has expanded exponentially since the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 as an RNA-programmable genome editing tool. Over the past seven years, this genome editing platform has been used to revolutionize research, develop new agricultural crops and even promises to cure genetic diseases. However, ethical and societal concerns abound, requiring a thoughtful and ongoing discussion among scientists and stakeholder groups.

Doudna is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and is Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Professor in Biomedical and Health. She is a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, Doudna received a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society.

This talk was hosted by the Institute of International Studies, as part of its Endowed Elberg Series. It was recorded by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Watch the video here.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Calculating your carbon footprint and the Cool Campus Challenge Apr 02, 2019

1.5 degrees Celsius. That's the maximum global temperature increase allowable before we see catastrophic impacts on food security, ecosystems, water access, frequency and extremity of weather events, according to a special 2018 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report warns global leaders and policymakers that failing to limit the earth’s temperature increase will result in a world that is unrecognizable – and extremely difficult to live in.

Given the urgency and magnitude of climate change, what are individuals’ role in helping to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius? How do our lives and habits need to change? How does our responsibility, as residents of the wealthiest country in the world, compare to those living in poverty? And how does individual responsibility for carbon reduction interact with corporate and industrial responsibility? Does it matter that we recycle and buy local produce and use public transit when the U.S. continues to buy oil from Saudi Arabia and 85% of Americans drive to work?

To answer these questions, Talk Policy to Me reporter and Goldman MPP student Reem Rayef spoke with Chris Jones, one of the makers of the CoolClimate Calculator. It's an online interactive tool that calculates users’ carbon footprints (the amount of CO2 they emit per year) using information about their homes, consumption habits and lifestyles. The calculator then provides custom recommendations to users on how they might “green” their lifestyles — from buying an electric vehicle to eating a vegetarian diet.

Through April, the campus is participating in the Cool Campus Challenge, designed to educate and motivate all nine UC campuses to take simple, energy-saving and waste-reducing actions to help the UC system reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2025. Students, staff and faculty are all invited to participate.

Read a transcript of this episode on Berkeley News.

Listen to more Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy’s website.

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Product engineer Amy Heineike on how humans and machines interact with AI Apr 02, 2019

Amy Heineike is the vice president of product engineering at Primer AI. One area the company is active in is around news data and news cycles — they model the contrasting narratives that people are telling around global stories using millions of statistical observations about entities and their relationships. Another area that they’re active in is around Wikipedia — human-written summaries and maintaining these summaries is extremely time intensive and Primer AI has formulated approaches to creating and maintaining pages.

For her talk, Heineike focuses on an idea that Primer AI had from the very beginning: How we think about humans and machines interacting with AI, how we understand the data and then, how we overcome the bias we discover.

Heineike gave her lecture on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Programmer and author Ellen Ullman on her life in code Apr 01, 2019

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer, essayist on technology and culture and an author of four books — two nonfiction and two novels — on the human side of technology. Her most recent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, in 2007 was named by the San Francisco Chronicle among the best books of the year.

Life in Code bookends her earlier work, in 1997, where that was named Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, recounting life as a woman technologist amongst and almost exclusively male workforce at the start of the global digital revolution. Twenty years later, Ullman reflects on digital technology's loss of innocence and reckons with all that has changed and so much that hasn't.

Dean of engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu spoke with Ullman on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Neurobiologist David Presti on the ritual use of psychoactive plants Mar 28, 2019

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants — relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these plants as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these plant-human interactions, often in ways that are highly interdependent.

David Presti, who teaches neurobiology, psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, gave an opening talk March 21 for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.

Presti has been on the faculty of Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for 28 years. He teaches classes on topics related to brain, mind, consciousness, neurochemistry and psychopharmacology. For more than a decade, he worked in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. And for the past 15 years, he has been teaching neuroscience and conversing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan and Nepal. He is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016) and Mind Beyond Brain (2018).

For upcoming events, visit the Heart Museum of Anthropology's website.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Poet Tarfia Faizullah reads from 'Registers of Illuminated Villages' Mar 26, 2019

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018) and Seam (2014). Faizullah has won a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award and other honors. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, including Poetry Magazine, Guernica, Tin House and The Nation. They are translated into Persian, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil and Spanish, and have been featured at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art and elsewhere. In 2016, she was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. In Fall 2018, she joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Visiting Writer in Residence.

Faizullah read her poetry on March 7, 2019, at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.

This talk was recorded by UC Berkeley’s Educational Technology Services. Watch the video.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Author Ashton Applewhite on counteracting ageism Mar 25, 2019

Ashton Applewhite, named one of PBS Next Avenue’s Influencers in Aging and author of the breakaway new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, share her own personal experiences with ageism — defined as “treating a person differently on the basis of age" and discusses her work, which explores ageism’s destructive impact on individuals, our communities and our policies.

Chronological age is often a key factor in decision-making about treatment for physical and mental health; or selection for housing, employment, or access to other opportunities, says Applewhite. Yet, she argues, age alone is a poor predictor and she pushes back on ageist assumptions that people within any given age group are all the same. They vary substantially in their capacities−and census data show growing diversity in every age group.

Nevertheless, unfounded ageist stereotypes result in marginalization and discrimination against older people.

This Chair Rocks does not simply identify the problem. It offers a wealth of ideas about how to counteract ageism. As Applewhite explored the subject, she discovered a clear upside: “The possibility that life could be more fun in your eighties had never crossed my mind…nor that such joyful clarity would be rooted in awareness — not denial — that time was short and therefore to be savored.”

This talk, given on March 15, 2019, was hosted by Ashby Village and the UC Berkeley Retirement Center, who are committed to transforming aging in community. They hope this talk sparks interest in continuing an intergenerational conversation about collaborative efforts to build a community that works well for all ages.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Jimmy López on composing 'Dreamers' oratorio inspired by Berkeley undocumented students Mar 20, 2019

Composer Jimmy López, who earned his Ph.D. in music from UC Berkeley in 2012, speaks about Dreamers, an oratorio he was commissioned by Cal Performances to write that is informed by interviews held with undocumented students at UC Berkeley. The piece was written in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, who created the libretto. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director designate of the San Francisco Symphony, conducted the world premiere performance of Dreamers in Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, March 17 at 3 p.m. with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, soprano Ana María Martínez, and a chorus of nearly 80 voices, including those from the UC Berkeley Chamber Choir.

López's talk was held in an open session of the academic course Thinking Through Art and Design @ Berkeley: Creativity, Migration, Transformation taught by Peter Glazer and Stan Lai held in Osher Auditorium, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on Thursday, March 14 at 12 p.m. It was free and open to the public.

Read a Q&A with Jimmy López, "Alumnus's 'Dreamers' oratorio inspired by Berkeley undocumented students" on Berkeley News.

See events related to upcoming shows by Cal Performances on calperformances.org.

Watch the world premiere of Dreamers and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Michael Pollan with Dacher Keltner on the new science of psychedelics Mar 17, 2019

In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan turns his focus to psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and the like — exploring their history, use, and potential to help people not only transcend, but also treat conditions from addiction to anxiety. On March 5, 2019, Pollan joined Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and founder of the Greater Good Science Center, for a conversation about the book.

This talk was recorded by Educational Technology Services. Watch the video and read "A trip of his own: Michael Pollan on writing and the power of psychedelics" on Berkeley Library News.

Photo by Alia Malley.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

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Talk Policy to Me: The California housing crisis Mar 16, 2019

NIMBYism, geographical limitation and weaponized policies have led California to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem?

California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here? Why has the development of solutions shifted from a city level to a state level?

UC Berkeley MPP student Spencer Bowen speaks with Ophelia Basgal and Elizabeth Kneebone from the Terner Center and California Assembly member, David Chiu. Here are five intersecting causes of California’s housing crisis that they help identify:

Limited land and diverse geography
Production not keeping pace with booming job market
Housing is expensive to build and new methods are limited
Cities wield their power to slow down or vote down projects that they don’t like
Proposition 13 and the California Environmental Quality Act have been weaponized to limit housing production

Talk Policy To Me is a podcast built by students at the Goldman School of Public Policy in partnership with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans.

Read more and listen to other Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy's website.

Read the transcript and listen on Berkeley News.

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Professor Michael Omi on racial classification in the census Mar 13, 2019

How are individuals and groups racially classified? What are the meanings attached to different racial categories? And what impact do these categories have on a range of policies and practices? Taking the U.S. Census as a site of racial classification, Michael Omi, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, examines the shifting state definitions of race and how individuals and groups assert, embrace, reject and negotiate different racial categories and identities.

Michael Omi is co-author, along with Howard Winant, of Racial Formation in the United States (3rd edition, 2015), a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place.

At UC Berkeley, Omi serves as the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, is a core faculty member in the Department of Ethnic Studies and is an affiliated faculty member of sociology and gender and women’s studies. Omi is also a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since its inception in 1959.

This lecture, given on Feb. 20, 2019, was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Year of the woman: Panel on the recent rise of women in politics Mar 07, 2019

National analysts have noted the sharply increased number of women running for elective office in 2018, especially among Democrats. In a panel discussion, “Year of the Woman?," Nicole Boucher, co-executive director of the California Donor Table; Mary Hughes, a democratic strategist and founder of Close the Gap California; and Amanda Renteria, chair of Emerge America examines the phenomenon in the California context and whether it's likely to continue in future election cycles. The discussion was moderated by Laurel Rosenhall, a political reporter for Calmatters.

This discussion was part of a Feb. 1, 2019 conference, “California Votes: A Post-Mortem on the 2018 Election,” hosted by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Dancer Akram Khan on performing the unimaginable, theater of war Mar 05, 2019

Dancer/choreographer Akram Khan appeared in the West Coast premiere of XENOS, a Cal Performances co-commission, in Zellerbach Hall on March 2-3, 2019.

Khan, who is of British and Bangladeshi descent, is celebrated for physically demanding, visually arresting solo productions that combine Indian kathak with contemporary dance to tell stories through movement. Khan’s full length solo performances of XENOS conjure the despair and alienation suffered by an Indian soldier recruited to fight for the British Crown in the trenches of World War I.

As an instinctive and natural collaborator, Khan has been a magnet for world-class artists from other cultures and disciplines. His previous collaborators include the National Ballet of China, actress Juliette Binoche, ballerina Sylvie Guillem, singer Kylie Minogue, writer Hanif Kureishi and composer Steve Reich.

In this talk, Akram Khan speaks with Cal Performances’ interim artistic director Rob Bailis in the weekly open session of the Arts + Design course Creativity, Migration, Transformation held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Feb. 28, 2019. The event was free and open to the public.

More information about the class can be found on Berkeley Arts and Design's website.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Berkeley Law Professor Catherine Fisk on reimagining labor law Mar 02, 2019

Berkeley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (2016), gave a lecture on Feb. 13, 2019, that examines some of the recent radical changes in the law of the workplace in California and nationwide. She discusses how the transformation of work through the gig economy and through the decline of union presents unprecedented challenges for regulating work for the common good, but how it also presents opportunities for a fresh start.

This lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at Berkeley. She teaches and writes on the law of the workplace, on the legal profession, and on free speech and freedom of association. Her most recent book is Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (2016) and her next book will be on labor protest and labor lawyers in the mid-20th century.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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East Bay poet Ari Banias reads new work at Lunch Poems Feb 26, 2019

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (2016), which was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in various journals, in Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and as part of the MOTHA exhibition, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects.

Banias is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program. He lives in Berkeley, teaches poetry and works with small press books.

On Feb. 7, 2019, Banias read his poetry — from Anybody and some new work — at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

See all Berkeley Talks.

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Richard Rothstein on how our government segregated America Feb 21, 2019

Richard Rothstein, a fellow of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America, gave a lecture on Feb. 6, 2019, about the forgotten history of how federal, state and local policy segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. This lecture was part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow, emeritus, at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004). Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Panel discussion: The Changing California Electorate Feb 13, 2019

In a panel discussion, "The Changing California Electorate," Lisa García Bedolla, the director of Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies; Kristin Olsen, a Republican who served on the California State Assembly from 2010-2016; Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project at USC; and Dan Schnur, director of the Sacramento Bee California Influencer series examine the changing demographics of California's population and electorate, the impact of the changes in 2018 and the implications for future election cycles. The discussion was moderated by Marisa Lagos, a political reporter for KQED.

This discussion was part of a Feb. 1, 2019 conference, "California Votes: A Post-Mortem on the 2018 Election," hosted by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Professor Tina Sacks on maintaining social welfare programs in the Trump era Feb 01, 2019

What are some of the current challenges to maintaining social welfare programs for the nation's most vulnerable people in the Trump era?

Tina Sacks, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Social Welfare, gave a lecture on this topic on Jan. 30, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

Sacks's fields of interest include racial disparities in health, social determinants of health, race, class and gender and poverty and inequality. Prior to joining Berkeley Social Welfare, Sacks spent nearly a decade in federal service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has also served as legislative director at the Baltimore City Health Department as well as executive director of the Illinois Association of Free and Charitable Clinics.

Read a transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall on decolonizing design Jan 30, 2019

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, public intellectual and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture and design. As dean of design at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada, she is the first Black woman dean of a faculty of design. She leads the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative, focused on using old ways of knowing to drive innovation processes that directly benefit communities.

Tunstall's talk, given on Jan. 25, 2019, is part of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation's design conversations.

Each semester, the institute invites a distinguished group of designers and thinkers to speak as part of Jacobs Design Conversations, Design Field Notes and its other public programs. This semester, these programs engage questions of inclusion, accessibility and justice under the title, For Whom? By Whom?: Designs for Belonging.

Read a Q&A with Tunstall and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation's Robert Kett.

Learn more about upcoming events in the series.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Ph.D. candidate Rosalie Lawrence on how our cells make decisions Jan 29, 2019

On Nov. 6, 2018, Ph.D. candidate in molecular and cell biology Rosalie Lawrence gave an interview on KALX's program, "The Graduates," about her research on how cells in our bodies make decisions. She studies mTORC1, a protein complex that interacts with cellular organelles called lysosomes and tells the cell when it has enough nutrients to grow. She is interested in the role mTORC1 plays in the development of cancer.

"The Graduates,"broadcast on the campus's community and student radio station KALX, features graduate student research at UC Berkeley. Listen or download past episodes on iTunes. This episode was hosted by Andrew Saintsing, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News(news.berkeley.edu).

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New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor on breaking the story that ignited #MeToo Jan 15, 2019

Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter and a recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her reporting on the #MeToo movement. Her work has exposed abuses of power, from Harvey Weinstein to Amazon. Kantor joined UC Berkeley's 2018 graduation celebrations as the commencement speaker for journalism students. Afterwards, she sat down with former Mother Jones editor Deirdre English to discuss the reporting process and holding established systems accountable.

This interview was recorded on May 24, 2018, for On Mic, a podcast by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It was produced by Lee Mengistu and Cat Schuknecht. For more conversations with some of the world's best writers, journalists and documentarians, check out other On Mic episodes. Technical facilities for On Mic are underwritten by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber on presidential power and individual rights Jan 07, 2019

Presidential power is always a hot topic, but never more so than today. This lecture, given by Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber on Sept. 25, 2018, explains the constitutional limits on the president and how individual rights are affected. Dan Farber is the Sho Sato Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. Professor Farber serves on the editorial board of Foundation Press. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Life Member of the American Law Institute. He is the editor of Issues in Legal Scholarship. He is the author of 18 books including, Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law, Judgment Calls: Politics and Principle in Constitutional Law, and Retained by the People: The Silent 'Ninth' Amendment and the Rights Americans Don’t Know They Have. He is also the author of Presidential Administration Under Trump.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Astronomer Bob Kirshner on the accelerating universe to accelerating science Dec 25, 2018

Twenty years ago, astronomers were astonished to learn from observations of exploding stars that cosmic expansion is speeding up. We attribute this to a mysterious “dark energy” that pervades the universe and makes up 70 percent of it. Scientists are working in many ways to learn more about the nature of dark energy, but our reservoir of ignorance is deep.

On Oct. 24, astronomer Bob Kirshner gave the 2018 Distinguished Lecture in Astronomy, “From the Accelerating Universe to Accelerating Science,” for which he summarizes the present state of knowledge and looks ahead to new ways to use infrared observations of supernovae to improve our grip on dark energy.

Kirshner leads the science program at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which makes over $100 million in grants for basic science each year, and served on the astronomy faculty at Harvard for 30 years.

The Distinguished Lecture in Astronomy is an annual public lecture sponsored by the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Clinicians discuss where health and human rights meet Dec 24, 2018

There are a greater number of forcibly displaced people in the world today than at any time since the end of World War II, and the Bay Area has welcomed many of these individuals. Hear from clinicians, including Sita Patel, who received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley and is an associate professor in clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, who are working directly with Bay Area refugees and asylum seekers about how they are restoring health and awakening hope in response to human rights abuses.

This Commonwealth Club of California program, called “A Global Perspective on Healing After Trauma: Where Health and Human Rights Meet,” took place on Nov. 15, 2018 and was supported by the Northern California Grantmakers Funder Network on Trauma and Resilience.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Michael Pollan on science, psychedelics and the human mind Dec 22, 2018

In May 2018, Michael Pollan, the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley and author of a multitude of best-sellers, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, sat down with former Mother Jones editor Deirdre English to discuss his new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

This interview was recorded for On Mic, a podcast by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. It was produced by Lee Mengistu and Cat Schuknecht. For more fascinating conversations with some of the world's best writers, journalists and documentarians, check out other On Mic episodes. Technical facilities for On Mic are underwritten by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Jennifer Doudna on gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution Dec 01, 2018

Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna joins oncologist Siddartha Mukherjee to discuss unprecedented advancements in gene editing and the effect new technologies will have on the future of humanity.

Dr. Doudna’s research has led to what is being called the biggest scientific discovery of our era: the development of the genetic editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9. This revolutionary technology has quickly transformed the landscape of genome engineering, creating limitless possibilities for impact within biomedicine, agriculture, climate and energy, and more, including treating — and possibly curing — genetic diseases.

Dr. Mukherjee is a celebrated physician and researcher. His book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2011, was named one of the 100 most influential books written in English since 1923 by TIME magazine, and was listed as one of the 100 notable books of 2010 by the New York Times magazine.

This conversation, which took place on Jan. 18, 2018, was sponsored by the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Anthropologist Eugenie Scott on evolution and creationism as science and myth Nov 30, 2018

Myths symbolize ideas, values, history and other issues that are important to a people. They may be true or false, mundane or fantastic; their significance is their meaning, not their narrative content. Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. Its conclusions tentatively may be true or false, but its significance is its explanatory power: one has confidence in the process of science, even though some explanations change over time.

Myth and science thus seem very different, but each has been utilized by proponents of both sides of the Christian creationism and evolution controversy.

Anthropologist Eugenie Scott, founding executive director of the National Center for Science Education Understanding, explores how this role is essential in comprehending — much less mediating — this persistent conflict.

Sponsored by the Graduate Division, this lecture, given on Oct. 4, 2018, is part of the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lecture Series.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Robert Reich on why the common good disappeared and how we get it back Nov 29, 2018

Professor of Public Policy Robert B. Reich ignites a discussion of the good we have had in common, what happened to it and what we might do to restore it. His goal is not that we all agree on the common good. It is that we get into the habit of thinking and talking about it, listening to each other's views and providing a means for people with opposing views to debate these questions civilly.

This lecture, given on Oct. 12, 2018, was presented by the Cal Class of 1968 and the Goldman School of Public Policy's Center on Civility and Democratic Engagement, which was founded by the Class of 1968.

Listen and read the transcript onBerkeley News.

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Artistic Director Robert Battle on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Nov 29, 2018

For over 50 years, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley has fostered a strong partnership with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Since the company's debut performance at Wheeler Hall in March of 1968, it has played a central role in Cal Performances’ dance programming for half a century. To commemorate the milestone 50th anniversary, then-executive and artistic director of Cal Performances Matías Tarnopolsky sat down with Battle in March 2018 for a conversation about his experience as an African American choreographer, artistic influences and vision for the Ailey company.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Commentator Van Jones on seeking environmental justice during climate change Nov 27, 2018

Across America, low-income and minority communities are being hit hardest by the economic and health impacts of climate change. Van Jones — news commentator, author and founder of Dream Corps — discusses how we can seek environmental justice for the country’s most vulnerable communities.

This talk, given on Nov. 13, 2018, is the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources Horace M. Albright Lecture in Conservation and also part of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health’s 75th Anniversary Speaker Series.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

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