Berkeley Talks

"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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"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) See acast.com/privacy for privacy

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. See a

"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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy an

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See a

"...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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"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

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

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

"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, A

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 a

"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 t

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&nbs

"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 wha

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 caseboo