Berkeley Talks

In the early 1960s, R.J. Reynolds, one of the largest and most profitable tobacco companies in the U.S. at the time, wanted to diversify its business. Its marketing strategies had been highly successful in selling its top brands, like Camel, Winston and Salem cigarettes, and executives thought, Why not apply the same strategies to, say, the food industry?So in 1963, R.J. Reynolds acquired Hawaiian Punch. It marked the beginning of the tobacco industry’s entry into the food sector. In the following decades, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris expanded aggressively into the food industry, acquiring major brands, like Del Monte, Nabisco, General Foods, Kraft and 7UP, where they produced hyperpalatable, chemically-engineered foods now known as ultra-processed foods, or UPFs. These products were marketed especially to children and other vulnerable groups. In Berkeley Talks episode 229, Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy in the School of Medicine at UC San Francisco, discusses how ultra-processed foo

In Berkeley Talks episode 228, Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan, discusses how the U.S. energy system has persistently harmed marginalized communities, a result of legacies of government-sanctioned policies, like redlining, land theft and resource extraction. He goes on to emphasize the need for intentional efforts to undo these harms. “When we think about energy justice, the goal is to achieve equity in both the social and economic participation in our energy system,” says Reames, who served as deputy director for energy justice at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden-Harris administration.In 2015, he says, some 14% of U.S. households couldn’t afford their energy bills, and 21% had to decide between buying food and medicine or paying their energy bills. Eleven percent were keeping their homes at an unhealthy temperature, either too hot or too cold, because they couldn’t afford energy or they couldn’t repair their HVAC system. Higher proportions of

By 2050, the global population is expected to reach about 10 billion people. That means we need to find a way to feed nearly 2 billion more mouths in the next 25 years. Industrial farming practices have already destroyed countless natural ecosystems, and experts say that expanding farmland even further would have devastating consequences for the planet. In Berkeley Talks episode 227, UC Berkeley Professor Timothy Bowles and journalist Michael Grunwald discuss the impact of our current agricultural methods and debate the ways we can ramp up food production without causing more harm to the environment. “Agriculture is eating the earth,” says Grunwald, author of the forthcoming book We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Farmland, he says, now covers two of every five acres on the planet, “and those are acres that used to be forest and wetlands and savannas that stored a lot of carbon and sheltered a lot of biodiversity.”  In order to avoid further dest

It took nearly six years for bestselling author Daniel Handler to sell his first book, a satirical novel called The Basic Eight. When his agent sold it in 1998, it was “for the least amount she had ever negotiated for,” laughed Handler, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event earlier this month.   More than two decades later, Handler has published seven novels. Under his pen name Lemony Snicket, he has written dozens of books for children, including the 13-volume series A Series of Unfortunate Events. His most recent book, And Then? And Then? What else?, is part memoir, part inspiration for aspiring writers. Handler was the keynote speaker at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life’s inaugural Jewish Arts and Bookfest, a day of events held on May 4 in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. Throughout the day, artists and authors came together for panel discussions, workshops and other programming that showcased the Jewish experience through art, culture and storytelling. In epis

In Berkeley Talks episode 225, The Atlantic journalists Yoni Appelbaum and Jerusalem Demsas discuss the decline of housing mobility in the United States and its impact on economic opportunity in the country. Appelbaum, author of the 2025 book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, began by tracing the history of housing mobility in the U.S. and its rapid decline in recent decades. He noted that in the 19th century, one out of three Americans moved to a new residence every year, and as late as 1970, one in five did. Today, only one in 13 people in the U.S. pack up their things and find a new place to live on an annual basis. “These constant moves in America, made possible by the constant construction of new housing, created a new kind of social order,” said Appelbaum, and most people “ended up better off for it.” The sharp decline in residential relocation, he said, caused largely by rising housing costs and restrictive zoning, is a major driver of

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is considered the father of Western philosophy, one whose most famous ideas have all but risen to the level of pop culture. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His name has been invoked by politicians to bolster their stance against “cancel culture.” There’s even an AI chat app modeled after Socrates that promises intelligent conversations. But what exactly were Socrates’ philosophical views? We may be quick to reference his name, but if asked, many of us would likely be hard-pressed to give a thorough account of what he actually believed. In Berkeley Talks episode 224, Agnes Collard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and author of the 2025 book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, joins UC Berkeley’s Judith Butler, a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and a leading philosopher and theorist, for a conversation. Together, they dive deep into Socrates’ work and beli

When J Finley arrived at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in 2006, she planned on studying reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after a fellowship in South Africa, where she studied the Zulu language and culture, Finley says she realized Black people were never going to get reparations. Switching gears, she started thinking: “How else do Black people make do? Well, we laugh.”In Berkeley Talks episode 223, Finley, an associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College who earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2008 and 2012, discusses her 2024 book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity. During the talk, Finley shares how Black women have used and continue to use humor and, more specifically, sass, to speak back to power and assert their own humanity. Black women’s humor, she contends, is “rooted in the racist, patriarchal and, many times, degrading conditions from which it developed” and is “an embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis that has come to be th

In Berkeley Talks podcast episode 222, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Brian Fitzpatrick, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, debate the merits of originalism in constitutional interpretation. Originalism is a theory that argues that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption nearly 250 years ago, rather than evolving with society. Arguments for originalism in this debate include: Originalism limits judicial discretion and prevents judges from imposing their own political views under the guise of constitutional interpretation.It promotes certainty, predictability and stability in law by relying on a fixed meaning of constitutional texts.Changes to the Constitution should be left to the formal amendment process, rather than judicial interpretation.Arguments against originalism include: Originalism is often unworkable in practice because it’s difficul

In Berkeley Talks episode 221, American historian Heather Cox Richardson joins Dylan Penningroth, a UC Berkeley professor of law and history, in a conversation about the historical evolution of the Republican Party, and the state of U.S. politics and democracy today. Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, is the author of the popular nightly newsletter Letters from an American, in which she explains current political developments and relates them to historical events. With more than 3 million daily readers, Richardson says Letters has grown a “community around the world of people who are trying to reestablish a reality-based politics.”Topics in the conversation include: The origins of the Republican Party: President Lincoln had a vision of a government serving the common person, including equal access to resources like education and land. After the Civil War, Republicans under Lincoln created a national taxation system, which former Confederates argued was an unfair redistribution of

If someone asked you to describe democracy in one word, what would you say? An October 2024 survey by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project, led by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson, asked people just that. Many respondents said, “freedom,” but a lot of others said, “broken.” In Berkeley Talks episode 220, Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady discusses how we got to a place of growing disillusionment with democracy, where so many mistrust the U.S. government and deride fellow voters’ ability to make informed decisions. In his Feb. 3 talk, part of the Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures series, Brady says factors include the rise of moral traditionalism and social division; the rise of the religious right; the demise of unions; and concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion and who belongs. There’s also a new division between less-educated elites and elite professionals, “which I think really affects us as university folks,”

When Luke Messac began his emergency medicine residency at Rhode Island Hospital in 2018, he noticed a lot of his patients came to him concerned about costs. Some worried about his recommendations for them to stay in the hospital overnight. Others questioned his motives when he asked them to undergo a test, like an X-ray or MRI. A few came in way too late in the course of their illnesses out of fear of the cost. He’d heard about aggressive debt collection practices at hospitals around the country that put people at risk of profound financial and legal consequences. It made him wonder: Was his hospital doing that, too? After a quick trip to the country courthouse to examine the case files, what he found troubled him. “I was inundated with what I thought were pretty horrific cases,” said Messac, author of the 2023 book, Your Money or Your Life: A History of Medical Debt Collection in the United States. “Low-income single moms, people living on disability, recent immigrants, were facing thousands of do

In Berkeley Talks episode 218, sociology professor Stephanie Canizales discusses her 2024 book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, about the experiences of undocumented immigrant youth as they come of age in the United States without their parents. Over six years, Canizales conducted 75 in-depth interviews with adult immigrants living in Los Angeles who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied children years before.  “Many arrive in the U.S. to find that long-settled relatives who are constrained by their own legal and socioeconomic status are unable to offer material and emotional support, rendering children unaccompanied upon their arrival,” says Canizales, faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), at a December 2024 event on campus. “Young people might feel disoriented as they are thrust into material and emotional independence, and their role as low-wage workers in the U.S.”Today, about 146,000 unaccompanied children from Central America, Mexico and other countries are appreh

In Berkeley Talks episode 217, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, director and assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, discuss their 2024 book, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. During the campus event, the scholars touch on the transformative role of imagination and storytelling, why responding to demagogues with condemnation doesn’t work and how to create a world where everyone feels they truly belong. The October 2024 conversation was moderated by Ashley Gallegos, director of the institute's Places of Belonging program.powell and Menendian contend that for people to feel a strong sense of belonging in society, they must see their own stories and experiences reflected in the broader social narrative that shapes their everyday lives. “What we say in the book is that if people don't see themselves in the story, not only will they reject the story, but they will reject it violently,” says Menendian, who supervises many of the instit

In Berkeley Talks episode 216, celebrated poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins in conversation with UC Berkeley English Professor Cathy Park Hong, a poet and writer whose creative nonfiction book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Together, they discuss the importance of genre fluidity and artistic experimentation, the role of disobedience in their writing and how language can be both a tool of oppression and liberation.“I personally feel a lot of affinity with you as a writer for many reasons,” began Hong, in front of a packed auditorium at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in April 2024. “But I think one of the key shared experiences is how the English language, once a site of estrangement and inadequacy for you, became this playground for bounty and experimentation. And part of that bounty and experimentation is how you refuse to limit genre by the way you swing from poetry to prose without feeling tethered by either.”“I think for me, ge

In Berkeley Talks episode 215, a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices. Panelists include: Wes Holliday, professor of philosophy. Holliday studies group decision-making, including the best methods of voting, especially in the democratic context. Marika Landau-Wells, assistant professor of political science. Landau-Wells studies the effect that threat perception has on national security decision-making, and how some decisions we make to protect ourselves can endanger many others.Saul Perlmutter, Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor of Physics and 2011 Nobel laureate. Perlmutter co-teaches a Big Ideas course, called Sense and Sensibility and Science, designed to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers by exploring key aspects of scientific thinking.Linda Wilbrech

In Berkeley Talks episode 214, former editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dean Baquet and Marty Baron, evaluate how the media covered the 2024 U.S. presidential election and share thoughts on how journalists should effectively cover Donald Trump’s second term.  In 2016, the New York Times was shocked that Trump won, because they didn’t understand that the country was “ready to elect a Donald Trump,” said Baquet at a UC Berkeley Journalism event on Nov. 13. But, he said, he thinks the coverage of the most recent election was much better.  “My argument would be that, and people have trouble accepting this, but all of the stuff you know about Donald Trump — his abuse of the tax structure that David Fahrenthold wrote about, his taxes and his tax dodges that the New York Times, including David Barstow, wrote about, the allegations of women, all of the things that became controversies about Donald Trump — were written about in the Americ

In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around the world, and how it can influence belief, for good and for bad. “Stories give a basis and a justification for people to take real life action,” Tangherlini said at an Alumni and Parents Weekend at Homecoming event on campus in October. “They can be retrospective justification, but they can also be motivating justification.” A computational folklorist, who’s also a professor in the School of Information and associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Tangherlini works at the intersection of informal culture, storytelling and AI. He uses a combination of methods from the study of folklore and machine learning to describe storytelling networks and classify stories. “This is where we start to unravel narrative at internet scale,” he said. “One of the t

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 i

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

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 operatio