Summer 2021: A Completed Life by Cal Alumni Association

SUMMER 2021 $4.95 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Deciding When It’s Over

Cover_SUM21_fnl.indd 1

THE EVOLUTION OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT FINDING A LONG-LOST UNCLE IN THE FSM ELAINE KIM RECKONS WITH RACE

6/3/21 4:09 PM

COVADS_SUM21.indd 2

5/12/21 4:50 PM

Contents

SUMMER 2021 VOL. 132 NO. 2

“ People think that we all graciously named our schools and streets after Martin Luther King. They forget that he was stabbed with scissors and spit on. They think these things were granted. Actually, they were struggled for.” —Elaine Kim, p. 49

24 ON THE COVER

Last Will I want to decide when to let go of my life. BY RUTH DIXON-MUELLER

Men Behaving Badly Psychologist David Buss, Ph.D. ’81, continues to explore the evolutionary roots of sexual harassment. BY JULIA M. KLEIN

GARTH ELIASSEN/GETTY IMAGES

Betting on Literature Author Joe Di Prisco, Ph.D. ’86, brings street smarts to literary outreach. BY PAUL WILNER

Finding Ken A writer searches for his long-lost uncle. BY ANDREW LEONARD

On strike: Berkeley students march under Sather Gate in January 1969 to demand the formation of ethnic studies at the University.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 1

TOC1_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 1

5/21/21 1:32 PM

Departments

5 Inbox 7 Editor’s Note

9 Now Showing

Welcome to The Edge A podcast for surviving our modern world.

Elaine Kim on a reckoning with race many years in the making

BY MADDY WEINBERG

BY LAURA SMITH

10 Gleanings Editing out sickle cell; VR Egyptian tombs; robot suction; Cal at Mills; etc.

55 Student View Read the winner of our inaugural undergraduate column contest.

Supplement 16 Now This Hello ET? This is SETI.

Q&A with Robert Cervero, Berkeley Transportation Policy Expert

18 Mixed Media Michio Kaku on the Theory of Everything; Jennifer Doudna gets the Walter Isaacson treatment; raising kids the huntergatherer way; etc.

22 Big Picture “Good fire”

Listen to The Edge on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Visit bit.ly/californiaedge for details.

49 We the People

Pacific Film Archive celebrates a half-century of curated cinema.

17 Five Questions

With help from UC Berkeley experts, California magazine editors Laura Smith and Leah Worthington explore cutting-edge, often controversial ideas in science, technology, and society.

The Gate

Rocket Man: Astronaut Leroy Chiao observes his image, refracted and reflected, in a floating droplet of water aboard the International Space Station.

Class Notes / Snapp Chats: Harvey Myman masters Masterpiece; Jennifer Capitolo keeps the taps running; a new Bear joins Team Stevens / In Memoriam

59 Spotlight

56 The Chancellor’s Letter Collective resilience in challenging times

Online Exclusive Why do we waste so much food? That’s what Laura Moreno, Ph.D. ’19, wants to know, so she set out to study the problem by going through people’s garbage. Her work has yielded lessons. Read, “We All Waste Food. One Researcher Wants to Know Why and How We Can Waste Less.”

Bears in Space

60 In House News from CAA

64 First Person Hammer time with Camryn Rogers ’21

Our Podcast:

The Edge Episode 12 2001: A Space Hotel Odyssey With new advancements in spaceflight, wealthy tourists could soon be booking rooms in cushy space hotels. But will these off-planet vacations be the exclusive domain of the ultra-rich or are they a giant step toward the final frontier? Laura and Leah speak with Charles Simonyi ’72, the fifth-ever space tourist, and Jeff Greenblatt Ph.D ’99, one of the minds behind the proposed Voyager Station space hotel, to find out. Find these and other exclusives at californiamag.org.

NASA

Telegraph

2 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

TOC2_SUM21_fnl2.indd 2

5/21/21 2:49 PM

05212021165003

Editor in Chief Pat Joseph

Deputy Editor Laura Smith

Senior Online Editor Leah Worthington

Editorial Assistant Maddy Weinberg ’20

Design Director Michiko Toki

Design Associate Anita Wong ’78

Interns Nathalia Alcantara

Katherine Blesie ’21 Charlie Pike Kailyn Rhone Advertising Sales Dir. Business Development Stephanie Tomasco

stephanie.tomasco@alumni.berkeley.edu

Marketing and Communications

Graphic Designers Cheryl Kalberer

Scott Sanchez

Editorial Office 510/900-8250 californiamag@alumni.berkeley.edu

Change of Address 510/900-8210

info@alumni.berkeley.edu

Summer 2021, Volume 132, No. 2 californiamag.org

You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram: twitter.com/californiamag facebook.com/californiamag instagram.com/californiamagazine

California (ISSN 0008-1302) is published quarterly by the Cal Alumni Association, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley CA 94720-7520. Membership dues include an annual subscription price of $6.50. Periodicals postage paid at Berkeley, California, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to California Address Change, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley CA 94720-7520. Annual membership is $75; life membership is $1,000. CALIFORNIA™ and © 2021 Cal Alumni Association.

Mastheads_SUM21_fnl.indd 3

5/10/21 3:13 PM

Executive Director and Chief Legal Officer

Clothilde Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79 Chief Operating Officer Susie Cohen Crumpler Senior Dir., Human Resources Jenny Robles ’96 Dir., Executive Office & Board Anjeannette Schnetz ’89 Chief Revenue Officer Matt Terwilliger Senior Director, Scholarships Administration and Development Anh Tran ’06 Chief Financial Officer Ann Truong General Manager, Pinecrest Operations Mike Yaley BOARD OF DIRECTORS Officers President Amanda Pouchot ’08, Park City Vice President Demetrios Boutris ’83, New York Vice President, Finance Kiran Rao ‘98, Los Altos Secretary-Treasurer Clothilde Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79,

San Francisco Directors Until 2021: Carol Liu ‘63, C.EAS ‘82, Los Angeles;

Ryan Waliany ‘08, San Francisco; Diane Dwyer ’87, Orinda; Justin Hogenauer ‘22, Los Angeles; Dionicia Ramos Ledesma ’01, San Leandro; Danielle Silveira ’11, Los Angeles Until 2022: Allard Chu ’09, Orange; Robert G. Sproul ’70, Moraga; Kirk Tramble ’93, Castro Valley Until 2023: Morris Budak ’70, Palo Alto; Talia Kennedy, M.J. ’09, San Francisco; Marsha Roberts ’90, Danville; Alfonso Salazar ’90, Los Angeles Until 2024: Anne Chambers ’75, MBA ’79, Moraga; John Palmer ‘05, Oakland; Amy Tong ‘12, San Francisco; Art B. Wong ‘63, San Francisco Distinguished Members

Gear up for summer. ShopCAA.com The Cal Alumni Association (CAA) and Fanatics have teamed up to bring you all your favorite Golden Bears merchandise. Plus, more than 20% of your purchase benefits CAA!

Carol Christ, Chancellor Jim Koshland, Chair, UC Berkeley Foundation Diana Harvey, Associate Vice Chancellor for Communications & Public Affairs Jim Knowlton, Director of Athletics Julie Hooper, President, UC Berkeley Foundation Eric Mart ’70, Alumni Regent Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Chair, Academic Senate Diana Wu, Dean, UC Berkeley Extension Victoria Vera ’21, President, ASUC Luis Tenorio ‘19, ‘26, President, Graduate Assembly

CAA CONTACT ALUMNI HOUSE ON CAMPUS Alumni House

Facilities Reservations

510/900-8225 or 888/CAL-ALUM (888/225-2586) Fax: 510/642-6252 info@alumni.berkeley.edu Website: alumni.berkeley.edu

510/900-8227

Alumni & Athletics Events

510/900-8210

Lair of the Golden Bear 510/900-8255

Marketing 510/900-8190

Membership

510/900-8235

President

Alumni Chapters

president@alumni.berkeley.edu

510/900-8240

Scholarships

The Berkeley Network

510/900-8230

510/570-3080

Student Engagement

Development

510/900-8243

510/900-8200

Travel (Cal Discoveries)

Executive Director

510/900-8222

510/900-8182

For CAA board minutes and information, go to alumni.berkeley.edu/board

Mastheads_SUM21_fnl.indd 4

5/10/21 3:13 PM

WE RECEIVED SEVERAL LETTERS REGARDING the University’s deci-

sion to rename Kroeber Hall (p. 12). Gayle Hartmann ’64 wrote that she was dismayed by the move. “There is no denying that the indigenous cultures of California were treated with genocidal cruelty by the settlers who poured into the state beginning in the 1700s. ... It seems to me, however, that the Building Name Review Committee is placing the blame for years of heinous acts on Kroeber in a misguided attempt to make one extraordinary individual responsible for the actions of many.” She concluded, “I would hope that rather than removing the name of a person who made significant contributions to the diverse history of California cultures, we would recognize that, in addition to his intellectual brilliance, Kroeber was a person of his time. ... Without [his work] we would know far less about the human past of California than we do.”

John and Nancy Garing (both ’60), lamented that Berkeley is “erasing history rather than making use of opportunities to be informed by it.” They suggest that campus retain the Kroeber name, but also consider “the creation of a substantial memorial to the American natives consumed in the holocaust enabled by the state and federal governments and so many settlers 150 years ago.”

David Dozier’s recollection of the riot that led to the Daily Californian’s independence (“The Park and the Paper,” p. 32) also prompted letters. Mark Alper, Ph.D. ’73, took issue with the author’s assertion that getting arrested was a “good way to learn what’s wrong with the criminal justice system.” Alper wrote: “As one who was arrested at one of the rallies in that period, and sent to the Santa Rita jail by the ‘Blue Meanies’ … I think it’s a bit naive to think that the criminal justice system treatment of white college students could give one a view of the criminal justice system treatment of arrestees of color from East Oakland.”

Finally, Andrew Watson ’68 wrote, in response to our interview with Professor Lawrence Rosenthal (p. 15), “Given the corrosive, polarized politics of America over the past few decades, I was pleased to discover that Cal has a ‘Center for Right-Wing Studies.’ Somehow I can’t seem to find a Center for Left-Wing Studies. Should we be surprised?” We welcome your feedback. Send email to californiamag@ alumni.berkeley. edu. You can also comment on stories on our website, californiamag.org, and on our various social media channels. —The Editors

We can’t wait to meet you!

The Sacramento Area’s Newest Cohousing Community

425-308-0639

Privately owned, fully equipped condominiums plus generous community amenities for neighborly gatherings and connection.

Washington-commons.org

Now reserving homes for a 2022 move in! WashingtonCommonsCohousing@Gmail.com

Call us to learn more about Washington Commons and our upcoming events

In a quiet neighborhood only two blocks from the Sacramento River, the River Walk, and close to many urban amenities. Minutes from Amtrak (8 trains/day to the Bay Area) and the Sacramento International Airport. A self-governing community of neighbors who know and care about eachother. A perfect combination of urban living, and authentic community. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 5

Inbox_SUM21_fnl.indd 5

5/20/21 12:09 PM

05202021141031

FP ADS_SUM21.indd 6

5/13/21 7:21 AM

Editor’s Note

ISTOCK PHOTO

Albert Camus called suicide the only “really serious philosophical problem,” and Shakespeare apparently agreed. “To be or not to be”: wasn’t that the question? Begging Albert and Hamlet’s forgiveness, the question isn’t what it used to be. After all, in Shakespeare’s pox-ridden London, the average life expectancy was around 30. Even as late as 1900, the world average life expectancy was only 32. Today, the figure is 72. The current pandemic will no doubt put a dent in the actuarial tables, but nothing like the influenza of 1918, which cut life expectancy in America by a full 12 years, from 51 to 39. We can thank advancements like plumbing, pasteurization, antibiotics, vaccines, and even synthetic fertilizers for our longer leases on life. But with the blessing of extra days and years come some accursed questions: not just whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows, etc., etc., but also, how much life is enough? When we feel our time has come, should we be extended the same courtesy afforded to most pets—namely, a comfortable passage into death, surrounded by loved ones—or should we be compelled to live to the bitter end, through incontinence and dementia and all the other outrageous fortunes that attend to old age? Our cover story in this issue (see “Last Will,” p. 24) eloquently argues for the former. The piece came to us unsolicited (“over the transom” as we say in the biz) from 83-year-old alumna Ruth Dixon-Mueller and nearly swamped the boat. The article so impressed us that we also did a podcast installment with her. (Listen to episode 11 of The Edge, “A Completed Life.”) Ruth, whose own title for her piece was “Don’t Call it Suicide,” got her Ph.D. at Cal in 1970 and taught for many years at UC Davis before moving to Costa Rica to grow coffee and pineapples. Now, approaching the end of a long, full life, she is a proponent—for herself and those who share her way of thinking— of what is generally known as physician-assisted suicide but which advocates like Ruth prefer to call medical aid-in-dying. As UCSF physician Lonny Shavelson, chair of the American Clinicians Academy on Medical Aid-in-Dying, stresses on the podcast, we shouldn’t let semantics cloud the issue. “Let me just clarify when we say medical aid-indying, I don’t like beating around the bush. So my language will be blunt. It’s taking medications to die. We want to know what we’re talking about.”

This may strike some readers as depressing, but Ruth feels quite differently. “To me, selecting a departure date rather than struggling with uncertainty until the medical battle is lost is an affirmation of my life, not a negation of it,” she writes. “Indeed, it relieves me of anxiety, knowing that I have a plan in place. Cheers me, even.” No matter how one feels, there is difficult ethical terrain to traverse here, including a slippery slope or two. It’s something we asked Dr. Guy Micco of Berkeley’s Program for the Medical Humanities to discuss with us in the sidebar on p. 28. Among other things, Micco warns: “Fear of severe disability and age-related illness is near-universal, including among physicians. … If the life of a person with a severe disability is thought not worth living, how easy might it be to push that person toward medical aid-in-dying? The same might be said regarding elders toward the end of their lives: ‘You’ve lived a good life. Why are you hanging on?’” Rest assured, there’s more in the pages ahead than heavy questions about end-oflife decisions. In this issue, you’ll also find a profile on author Joe Di Prisco, the colorful Brooklyn boy-cum-Berkeley author behind the Joyce Carol Oates Prize (“Betting on Literature,” p. 36), writer/Berkeley alum Andrew Leonard’s engaging essay about learning the truth of his “cautionary tale” uncle (“Finding Ken,” p. 40), a piece about psychologist David Buss and the evolutionary origins of male sexual misbehavior (“Men Behaving Badly,” p. 30), and a discussion with Asian studies pioneer Elaine Kim (“We the People,” p. 49). All that, plus a newly launched student column contest (Student View, p. 55) and an installment of our regular Spotlight roundup (p. 59) featuring “Bears in Space”—Cal alumni who have become astronauts, rocket scientists, and the like. I hope you enjoy the issue. Even more importantly, I hope it makes you think— yes, even about death—then moves you to seize the day. —Pat Joseph CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 7

Ed Note_SUM21_fnl.indd 7

5/20/21 11:21 AM

05202021132525

$200

cash back bonus offer*

Cal Alumni Association Cash Rewards credit card from Bank of America Maximize your cash back by choosing how you earn rewards Carry the only card that helps support Cal Alumni Association

• Get a $200 cash back bonus if you make at least $1,000 in purchases in the first 90 days of account opening* • To change your choice category for future purchases, you must go to Online Banking, or use the Mobile Banking app.1 You can change it once each calendar month, or make no change and it stays the same. • Contactless card – The security of a chip card, with the convenience of a tap

To apply for a credit card,

please visit bofa.com/CalAlumni

Earn 3% and 2% cash back on the first $2,500 in these combined purchases each quarter, then earn 1% thereafter.

For information about the rates, fees, other costs and benefits associated with the use of this card or to apply, please visit bofa.com/CalAlumni Residents of the US and its territories only. See full disclosure for details. *Bonus Cash Rewards Offer. You will qualify for $200 bonus cash rewards if you use your new credit card account to make any combination of purchase transactions totaling at least $1,000 (exclusive of any fees, returns and adjustments) that post to your account within 90 days of the account open date. Limit 1 bonus cash rewards offer per new account. This one-time promotion is limited to customers opening a new account in response to this offer and will not apply to requests to convert existing accounts. Your account must be open with active charging privileges in order to receive this offer. Other advertised promotional bonus cash rewards offers can vary from this promotion and may not be substituted. Allow 8–12 weeks from qualifying for the bonus cash rewards to post to your rewards balance. The value of this reward may constitute taxable income to you. You may be issued an Internal Revenue Service Form 1099 (or other appropriate form) that reflects the value of such reward. Please consult your tax advisor, as neither we, nor our affiliates, provide tax advice. 1 Mobile Banking. Mobile Banking requires that you download the Mobile Banking app and is only available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. By opening and/or using these products from Bank of America, you’ll be providing valuable financial support to Cal Alumni Association. This credit card program is issued and administered by Bank of America, N.A. Visa and Visa Signature are registered trademarks of Visa International Service Association, and are used by the issuer pursuant to license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. Bank of America and the Bank of America logo are registered trademarks of Bank of America Corporation. The Contactless Symbol and Contactless Indicator are trademarks owned by and used with permission of EMVCo, LLC. ©2021 Bank of America Corporation 3145528 AD-03-21-0335.A

FP ADS_SUM21.indd 8

5/13/21 7:21 AM

Now Showing

DENNIS GALLOWAY/COURTESY OF BAMPFA

Pacific Film Archive celebrates a half-century of curated cinema. By Maddy Weinberg ’20

THIS YEAR, BERKELEY’S PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE celebrates its 50th anniversary—that is, in its physical form. While the PFA technically opened its doors in 1971, it actually came into being several years earlier, before it had any doors, born from the mind of writer Sheldon Renan. A graduate of Yale University, Renan spent his early career in New York City, writing television commercials and working for film importing companies. In 1966, he moved to the Bay Area, hoping to launch his own film archive. He landed in fertile territory. In downtown Berkeley, the Cinema Guild—where part-owner and budding film critic Pauline Kael honed her writing chops— opened in the early 1950s. The San Francisco International Film Festival held its inaugural program in 1958. By the 1960s, several Cal language and literature faculty had already added film to their curricula to meet student demand. And even the Berkeley culinary institution, Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse—also established in 1971— was named for a character in the films of French auteur Marcel Pagnol. Shortly after arriving, Renan began exhibiting films on the Cal campus and collecting proceeds to put toward his yet-tobe-named archive. He imagined a model similar to that of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s film department, under the umbrella of a fine arts museum. After being rejected by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum, Renan found a sympathetic audience in Peter Selz, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum. A fellow former New Yorker, Selz embraced Renan’s vision and, with guidance from Cinémathèque Française founder Henri Langlois, pledged to help grow his fledgling archive. The three men signed an agreement outlining their mission: “to protect the films of independent California filmmakers and to contribute to their spreading [and] preservation.” As director of the newly christened Pacific Film Archive, Renan organized weekly campus screenings, in Wheeler Auditorium or Dwinelle Hall, showcasing avant-garde, international, and classic films. Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Cineaste other celebrated directors would someat work: Founder times drop in to introduce their work. Sheldon Finally, after several years of bouncRenan in ing between lecture halls, the PFA his office in the found its first physical home inside the early days Berkeley Art Museum—the once-iconic of the archive

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 9

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmt2_crx.indd 9

5/21/21 3:29 PM

Gleanings

“Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin.”

10 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmt2_crx.indd 10

5/21/21 3:29 PM

AP/JANICE HANEY CARR; TRUCK: PHOTO CENTRAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Brutalist structure on Bancroft Way. When that building was deemed seismically unsound in the 1990s, the PFA moved to a temporary space on campus before landing in its current locale—a metal-clad, sky-lit building on Oxford Street—rejoining its partner institution to create the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Through each relocation, the PFA has continued to offer a wide variety of film programs, screening everything from French New Wave favorites to works from Senegal, Hungary, and Vietnam. The archive also boasts the largest collection of Japanese films outside of Japan. A fan of directors like Akira Kurosawa (whose film Dodeskaden was the first one screened at the PFA in 1971), Renan wanted the PFA to showcase films from the entire Pacific Rim—a fact that helps explain the archive’s name. During a recent virtual tour of the archive’s library, Jason Sanders, the PFA’s film research associate, pulled up an image of what he calls the “Valley of Knowledge,” a space on BAMPFA’s lower level where, in pre-pandemic times, BAMPFA’S GRAND RE-OPENING visitors could inquire about and view archived materials on monitors in the ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL, THE BERKELEY ART center of the room. With more than 15,000 films and videos, 150 international film periodical MUSEUM REOPENED ITS DOORS—more than a year after titles, 36,000 film stills, 7,500 posters, and more than 7,600 books on film the- it halted in-person visits due to COVID-19. Among the ory, history, and criticism, the archive can be daunting, to say the least. Sand- exhibitions now on display is Kay Sekimachi: Geometries, ers—who, according to colleagues, has an “encyclopedic knowledge” of the an extensive survey of textile art by renowned fiber artist (and Berkeley local since 1930) Kay Sekimachi. archive’s treasures—enjoys helping folks find what they need. “One of our misA first-generation descendant of Japanese immigrants, sions is to be open to everyone,” he says. “It’s really fun to share [the archive] Sekimachi is known for her innovative construction with people.” techniques and use of materials that celebrate her To make the archive even more accessible, Sanders and his team have been heritage, such as antique Japanese paper and maple busy digitizing and indexing the PFA’s collection. Documents such as publicity leaves. The exhibition features nearly 50 works from materials, program notes, scholarly articles, and letters from filmmakers can throughout her decades-long career, including her early be viewed online through a project called CineFiles. Much of the PFA’s film monofilament sculptures—suspended at the gallery’s center—as well as origamiand audio collection—including interviews with artists inspired pieces and Sekimachi’s like David Lynch, Angela Davis, and Marlon Riggs—is also more recent minimalist weavavailable online at Archive.org. ings. “Honoring a ‘California Sanders’s favorite PFA offering: documentaries by girl’ at her hometown museum Newsreel, an activist film collective established in the late ... is just a gift,” said curator 1960s. Sampling clips from Newsreel pieces on the Black Jenelle Porter. “Curators make Panther Party and People’s Park, Sanders explains that exhibitions for many reasons, footage like this is central to PFA’s mission: to preserve among them to see art in perBerkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna’s son, to gather objects together California’s history through film. response to a question on the podcast in a gallery so that we might While the PFA staff have continued to offer virtual proStereo Chemistry, about her favorite generate knowledge, context, grams during the pandemic, they are keen to welcome viscelebrity encounter. Doudna was on and conversation. Seeing Kay’s itors back to normal. “Of course I’m still so paranoid about the show with fellow Nobel laureate artwork in person after this what ‘normal’ is going to be,” says Sanders. “But it’ll just long year of crises and closures Frances Arnold, Ph.D. ’85, who said, “All be good to open and to see people streaming through the will, I hope, be a kind of balm.” right, I met Jimmy Page. And he’s pretty building and into the theater again.” Kay Sekimachi: Geometries cool. … But I actually got to go to Sidney In a 1971 interview, Renan said of his infant archive: will be available for viewing at Poitier’s 80th birthday party, and that “This whole thing is put together with spit, chewing gum, BAMPFA through October 24, was really spectacular.” [and] good intentions.” Fifty years later, those bonds still 2021. —M.W. hold.

PFA: SAM SILVER/COURTESY OF BAMPFA; BAM: KAY SEKIMACHI, AMIYOSE III, 1965/2004; NYLON MONOFILAMENT, 54 X 14 X 10 IN; THE COLLECTION OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA, GIFT OF THE ART GUILD.

Epic appearance: Renan and Japanese film legend Akira Kurosawa at the PFA, July 1978

Telegraph

Scientists Take Aim at Sickle Cell WHEN THE GENE-EDITING TECHNOLOGY CRISPR/CAS9 was discovered in 2012 by Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, it changed genetics forever. “We’ve been able to read and write DNA for a long time. We have machines to sequence it (read); and to synthesize it (write). What we haven’t TIME TO ELECTRIFY TRUCKING FLEET been able to do is to rewrite it—to edit it. And now we have a tool that lets you do something about that,” Doudna told THE EXTINCTION OF SMOKEBELCHING, diesel-guzzling, comCalifornia in 2014. mercial long-haul trucks could be Now, nearly a decade after its discovery—and a on the horizon, according to a study 2020 Nobel Prize for Doudna and Charpentier—UC from Lawrence Berkeley National scientists have been given the FDA’s go-ahead to use Laboratory and UCLA. The metaCRISPR in clinical trials to treat sickle cell disease, the phorical asteroid that would do the congenital disorder that contorts red blood cells into behemoths in? A combination of artery-clogging crescents. The painful and sometimes improved technology and public fatal condition afflicts more than 70,000 Americans policy to promote the transition and is particularly common among those with African to battery-powered rigs. ancestry. Currently, the only cure is a stem cell transThe switch to electric would not only save truckers money (up plant from bone marrow, which is risky. Berkeley geneticist Fyodor Urnov to $200,000 in lifelong ownership Because sickle cell is caused by a single mutation exclaiming, in a tweet, about the succosts), it could also help cut air on the beta-globin gene, it’s an attractive target for cessful preliminary results of a new pollution and curb global warming. CRISPR therapy. Only one defective segment of DNA gene-editing therapy to treat sickle Trucking now accounts for nearly in the affected gene needs to be overwritten. Scientists cell disease. “Gregor” is Gregor Mendel, a third of all greenhouse gas emisfrom Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSF are set to do just that the “father of genetics.” “Rosalind” is sions from motor vehicles. this summer, when they’ll begin the first in-human Rosalind Franklin, who played a crucial While battery technology is often clinical trial of CRISPR gene-correction therapy in role in elucidating the double helix thought to be a key limiting factor in nine patients with sickle cell disease. the adoption of electric trucks, the structure of DNA. For now, researchers will repair the damaged cells study’s authors contend that, in fact, “recent dramatic declines in battery ex vivo, or outside the body, but they are confident prices and improvement in their they will soon find ways to deliver the CRISPR therapy energy density have created oppordirectly to bone marrow in patients. tunities for battery-electric trucking today that were selSickle cell may be just the start. “Our efforts will have a ripple dom anticipated just a few years ago.” effect to enable cures for blood disorders in general … as well as What’s lacking, rather, is an “appropriate policy diseases of the immune system,” Berkeley scientist Ross Wilson, ecosystem” to address existing barriers to adoption, director of therapeutic delivery at the Doudna-founded Innovative including higher up-front costs and a lack of charging Genomics Institute, told Berkeley News. “The hematopoietic stem infrastructure. With the right policies and incentives, cell is the seed for the entire immune system, so all blood disorders however, the world’s trucking fleets could soon be can theoretically be cured by a stem cell therapy like this.” running on electrons. — Charlie Pike — Katherine Blesie

GREGOR.

(and Rosalind)”

AP/JANICE HANEY CARR; TRUCK: PHOTO CENTRAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

PFA: SAM SILVER/COURTESY OF BAMPFA; BAM: KAY SEKIMACHI, AMIYOSE III, 1965/2004; NYLON MONOFILAMENT, 54 X 14 X 10 IN; THE COLLECTION OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA, GIFT OF THE ART GUILD.

“OH. MY.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 11

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmtt.indd 11

5/18/21 10:41 AM

Gleanings

IT’S NO SECRET THAT BERKELEY’S BANCROFT LIBRARY HOUSES a trove of ancient Egyptian papyri. But how did it end up there? The answer lies in reptile carcasses. It seems the ancient Egyptian priests had a problem: their mummified crocodiles, intended as offerings to the croc god Sobek, would not keep their shape. So they stuffed them with scraps of used papyri, the ancient precursor to our paper. Centuries later, in 1899, a team of archaeologists, funded by Berkeley benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, stumbled across these papyri-stuffed, mummified crocs while on a dig in Umm el-Baragat, Egypt, site of the ancient city of Tebtunis. When the researchers discovered the scraps of letters, bills, and other banal records, they realized they had hit on something big: a paper trail into everyday life in Tebtunis, including such humdrum artifacts as tax documents, contracts, petitions, and complaints. In one example, an ancient villager wrote to a village official petitioning for help after “an attack was made upon my dwelling by Arsinoe.” As Andrew Hogan, postdoctoral fellow at the Bancroft’s Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, told Berkeley News, working with these papyri texts allows researchers to “[peel] away below the 1 percent. So, you’re getting IT’S BEEN MORE THAN A YEAR since Berkeley moved to the vast majority of the lived experience to remote learning, but students, staff, and faculty for most people in the ancient world.” at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design While Hogan focuses on the quotidian need look no further than their computer screens history of ancient Egypt, Professor Rita Lucarelli, faculty curator of Egyptology at the to get a taste of their pre-pandemic lives. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, is working A team of VR specialists and students led by on a virtual reality museum experience. Aptly Berkeley architecture Professor Luisa Caldas crenamed “Return to the Tomb,” the headsetated Virtual Bauer Wurster, a program that allows enabled tour transports viewers into the users to visit the beloved architecture building realm of the ancient dead. Lucarelli said the without leaving home. Via avatar, students and VR exhibit allows viewers to “have the expefaculty can stroll through studio spaces, chat with rience of entering a tomb, walking around a each other over Slack or Zoom, examine docucoffin, and interacting with these beautiful ments pinned to digital whiteboards, and upload funerary texts and images.” work to their desks. The project stems from a push to digitize museum artifacts from around the world in From March to May, Virtual Bauer Wurster hopes that one day they may be returned to even held its first public exhibition: Building for a the tombs, villages, and towns from which Decarceration Nation, which included a gallery talk they were taken. and Q&A session. Project coordinator Chris Hoffman told The virtual space will likely survive after camBerkeley News, “We’re doing something pus reopens. Vishaan Chakrabarti, dean of the quite groundbreaking, in terms of building CED, said he hopes that, in addition to providing “a an immersive virtual reality experience that

Architecture Students Interact in VR Home

is authentic, in using scholarly content and making it available to many more people while preserving artifacts.” — C.P.

stopgap for the pandemic circumstances,” the project will also “help create new possibilities for the future of online learning.” — Nathalia Alcantara

Trypophobia

Are you freaked out by sponges? Do honeycombs send you over the edge? You might have trypophobia, a condition that causes one to have a fear of small, clustered holes. While not officially recognized as a medical disorder, trypophobia has gained traction across the internet as more and more people self-diagnose. One study found that 16 percent of participants were repulsed by the ghastly sight of a lotus pod.

Cute aggression

OK, so your brain can handle holes. Congrats! But have you ever seen something cute—think kittens or babies—and instantly felt an urge to: a) eat it, b) squeeze it, or c) crush it in your hands? First described by researchers at Yale, that emotion is now called cute aggression, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the population have experienced the phenomenon. According to UC Riverside psychologist Katherine Stavropoulos, “Cute aggression appears to be a complex and multi-faceted emotional response that likely serves to mediate strong emotional responses and allow caretaking to occur.”

Psychedelic chaplaincy

An irrational fear of holes and a strange yearning to crush cute things. Hmm. It’s safe to say that our brains produce some very odd states of mind. If you’ve ever thought about delving deeper into the back alleys and byways of your consciousness, you might consider contacting a psychedelic chaplain to help guide you. Researchers are refamiliarizing themselves with the potential of psychedelics to treat conditions ranging from addiction to PTSD. Psychedelic chaplains can help prepare patients for their journey. For more on the subject, tune into episode 10 of our podcast, The Edge, “A Shroom of One’s Own.” — C.P.

CROCODILE: STEFANBANEV; EGYPT: PHOEBE A. HEARST MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UC BERKELEY, 15-18884

ANCIENT EGYPT COMES ALIVE AT BERKELEY

12 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmtt.indd 12

5/18/21 10:41 AM

Telegraph

Still Rad: Berkeley Lab celebrates nine decades

Total number of Nobel Prizes won by Berkeley Lab personnel (eight in physics, five in chemistry, and one peace prize for 23 Lab employees who contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

1939

2020 Year of Lab’s most recent Nobel Prize; Jennifer Doudna of the Lab’s Joint Genome Institute shared the chemistry prize

Year founding Lab director Ernest Orlando Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the cyclotron particle accelerator

Number of elements discovered at Berkeley Lab

1954

Number of years that Berkeley Lab, founded on August 26, 1931, as the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab, has been in operation

15 97

Atomic number of berkelium, first synthesized at Berkeley in 1949

Number of National Medal of Science winners 43

Tc At Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Technetium

Astatine

[98]

Neptunium

[210]

100

Plutonium

[237]

101

Americum

[244]

102

Curium

[243]

103

Berkelium

[247]

104

Californium

[247]

105

[251]

106

Es Fm Md No Lr Rf Ha Sg Einsteinium

Fermium

Mendelevium

Nobelium

Lawrencium

Rutherfordium

Hahnium

Seaborgium

[254]

[257]

[258]

[259]

[262]

[267]

[262]

[269]

Year the Bevatron particle accelerator, the name of which was derived from “billions of electronvolts (eV) synchrotron,” began operation

1993

Year Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) synchrotron was completed

2008

Year the Transmission Electron Aberrationcorrected Microscope, the world’s most powerful electron microscope, was unveiled at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry

1946

Year in which scientists at the Rad Lab devised the trefoil warning symbol for radioactivity

$946 million Berkeley Lab operating cost (FY 2019)

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 13

Numbers_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 13

5/17/21 5:05 PM

05172021190747

Why

resort living

isn’t just for vacations

cost. What makes a great resort makes a great retirement too. Special Spring Incentives It’s time to pack your bags, sell that high-maintenance home and join us for the vacation of a lifetime. To learn about limited time savings, call Angie Machado at (800) 544-5546 or visit cvmanor.org

8545 Carmel Valley Road Carmel CA 93923

License #270700110 COA #082 Job # / Name: CVM-288 CalMagAd Resort_ME01 Publication: Cal Magazine

Due at pub: 04/23/2021

ASKED TO CHOOSE A SUPERPOWER, few people would think “suction.” But it turns out that robots with suction hands can achieve superhuman sorting performance, a capability that could soon revolutionize e-commerce warehouses. In March, Ambi Robotics, a company co-founded in 2019 by Berkeley engineering professor and roboticist Ken Goldberg and four graduate students, announced two flagship products. The first, AmbiSort, is a technology that enables industrial robots to “grasp, scan, and place objects at twice the speed of human workers,” Goldberg said. The second, AmbiKit, is a robotic system for assembling subscription boxes, gift sets, and the like. The brains of the suction-equipped robots are based on the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net), a deep machine learning program created by Berkeley researchers to train robots to grasp a vast array of novel objects—a notoriously challenging task for machines. Ambi Robotics raised $6.1 million in seed funding and aims to use the technology to address the growing demand for package handling due to the increase in online shopping, a trend that has accelerated during the pandemic. As Goldberg sees it, “E-commerce demand will continue to grow, and robots will be there to fill the gaps when there are not enough human workers to do the job— and to tackle the dangerous, dull, and dirty jobs so that human workers can focus on what they do best.” —N.A.

Date: 04/23/2021 Issue date: Summer ‘21

Ad Size:

Bleed:

Trim:

Live: 4.75” x 9.25”

Sign Off:

AD: RK

Proofer: MB

AE: DG

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmtt.indd 14

Warehouse bots get a grip with suction

5/18/21 10:41 AM

MILLS: PHILLIP BOND/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SOLAR PANELS: UC MERCED

Those 65 and better can enjoy this vacation destination year-round. Like many resorts, Carmel Valley Manor has impeccable service, three delicious meals a day, acres of pristine gardens with a pool, putting green, car service, even a personal trainer. In addition to housekeeping services, most of the apartments enjoy private patios where you can soak up the sunshine 300 days a year. Unlike other retirement communities, Carmel Valley Manor offers three levels of healthcare, independent living, assisted living and skilled nursing, all at no additional

Telegraph

Mills College Closes, but Opens Doors to Cal Students IN EARLY MARCH, the leadership of Mills College announced that

t e -

y g d , l t c ,

n r n -

e s e — y n

MILLS: PHILLIP BOND/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SOLAR PANELS: UC MERCED

d k o l r

the institution would discontinue its enrollment for first-year students after fall 2021. By 2023, the small private college in Oakland, established in 1852 for the education of undergraduate women, will be officially closed. When one door closes, however, another opens. With Mills’s closure, Berkeley has found a partial solution for an ongoing problem: the University has long struggled to provide enough housing or classroom space for its incoming students. To help combat this shortage, Berkeley has already created special programs for firstyear students, including the Fall Program for Freshmen (FPF) and the (pandemic-suspended) Global Edge in London. A WIN-WIN FOR CALIFORNIA WATER FPF is a one-semester program, started in 1984, that proACCORDING TO A TEAM OF SCIENTISTS FROM vides the opportunity for about UC MERCED, California’s 4,000 miles of irriga750 first-year students in the tion canals lose 63 billion gallons of water each year to evaporation—a problem that College of Letters and Science could be solved by shading them with solar to take core classes together off panels. Berkeley’s main campus. BerkeIn their feasibility study, published in the ley Global Edge in London is journal Nature Sustainability in March, the a fall semester international researchers proposed that an over-canal program for incoming students solar network would not only reduce evapothat was created in 2015 and ration but also power the pumps needed to had 90 students in 2019. (The move water across the state. California’s latter was suspended in 2020 massive water conveyance system, the largdue to COVID-19 and will not est in the world, could go from being the single largest consumer of electricity in the return in the fall of 2021.) state to being largely self-powering. Ramu Nagappan, assistant Installing solar panels over aqueducts dean of UC Berkeley Extension, has the additional benefit of not disturbing which runs FPF , told Berkethe surrounding landscape. As Michael Kipley News that the program has arsky, director of Berkeley’s Wheeler Water been a success, demonstrating Institute, told Wired: “You’re taking something “small, but measurable differthat’s already been altered by human activity ences in academic outcomes— and doubling up on the benefits it provides. their GPAs are slightly higher, their time to graduate is a little faster than That’s the profound piece.” The researchers have not yet put a price College of Letters and Science students who start on the main campus.” tag on their vision, and there are still some The University hopes to duplicate that success with a new yearlong opporvexing details to contend with. For example, tunity, the UC Berkeley Changemaker in Oakland program, for roughly 200 the panels could deprive waterbirds of key first-year students to take core classes at Mills. habitat in a state “The academic experience will be cozier, but otherwise similar, with increasingly with an even more state-of-the-art Berkeley Changemaker curricfewer wetlands. ulum,” said Richard Lyons, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entreBut it’s a step in preneurship officer. Launched in 2020, Berkeley Changemaker is the right direction, described as “a way to codify an essential part of what UC BerkeKiparsky said. “With ley has always stood for” with a curriculum that “activates underor without climate change, the supply graduates’ passions and helps them develop a sharper sense of who of water in California they want to be and how to make that happen.” Just one of the many sticky notes-tois tightening, and Said Lyons, “What excites me most about this program is how self that former Bears quarterback the demand for it points the way to our future. For example, as UC Berkeley gets Aaron Rodgers affixed to the “Jeopwater in California larger, my sense is that integrated first-year programming like this is increasing. And ardy” podium when he guest-hosted will become more and more valuable. And having first-year prothose two facts the game show in April. Others read, gramming like that of Berkeley Changemaker that aligns with valtogether mean that, “Slow Down,” “Speak Less,” “Relax,” ues that so sharply distinguish Berkeley—values like question the indeed, any water and “Energy.” By all accounts the status quo and serve the greater good—feels like the right direction savings is good, 2020 NFL MVP nailed the gig. as well.” and it’s welcome.” —K.B. —Kailyn Rhone

“Stand Up Straight”

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 15

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmtt.indd 15

5/18/21 10:41 AM

Now This SETI@Berkeley: Breakthrough Listen

Automated Planet Finder

At Lick Observatory on California’s Mt. Hamilton sits the Automated Planet Finder, the first-ever telescope able to identify potentially life-supporting planets in faraway galaxies. Using its world-class spectrograph, which is able to observe the slightest of changes in stellar velocity, the Automated Planet Finder scans nearby stars for artificially made optical laser transmissions. Did somebody say encoded, alien laser messages?

Green Bank Telescope

You!

The Green Bank Telescope, located in the mountains of West Virginia, is the biggest steerable dish radio telescope on Earth. And its accuracy is unmatched. The dish can sift through billions of radio channels simultaneously, looking for those artificial signals that would confirm the presence of intelligent life. The dish is also in the National Radio Quiet Zone, which means that if you want to visit, you’ll need to leave your mobile phone at home.

If you are over-the-moon excited about this research, you might consider joining the team. With SETI@home, it’s never been easier. Operating through the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing (or BOINC), the SETI@ home program turns your laptop into a personal telescope, using its spare processing power to analyze data and search for signals. With some luck, your computer could answer one of humanity’s most intriguing questions: Are we alone in the universe?

16 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmt2_crx.indd 16

5/21/21 3:29 PM

COURTESY OF ROBERT CERVERO

Parkes Radio Telescope

About three-fifths the size of a football field, the 64-meter Parkes telescope resides at the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. In operation since 1961, the Parkes telescope detects radio waves that range in length from the micro (seven millimeters) to the macro (four meters). The telescope has discovered upwards of 2,500 new galaxies and plays an important role in Breakthrough Listen’s search for signs of life. Its location on the opposite side of the globe allows Berkeley to scan parts of the sky that were previously out of reach.

EARTH:ISTOCK; AUTO PLANET FINDER: ABN IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GREEN BANK : JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PARKES: AMANDA SLATER; LAPTOP: ISTOCK; SPOCK: CBS/PHOTOFEST

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is alive and well at Cal. Researchers at the Berkeley SETI Research Center are collaborating on Breakthrough Listen, the largest ever scientific search for alien communications, using an array of telescopes and observatories to gather artificially generated, electromagnetic signals from across the universe. These signals include microwaves, radio waves, laser signals, and infrared waves, the idea being that extraterrestrial, intelligent life might too be listening to the radio or microwaving their macaroni and cheese. The discovery of such signals would provide powerful evidence for the existence of alien life. Here are some of Berkeley’s eyes and ears observing the vast unknown. —C.P.

5 Questions

Telegraph just can’t get things done as quickly. Also, our elected officials get political capital by cutting the ribbon on new projects, not by filling potholes. So there’s this natural tendency in democratic societies to defer maintenance. Most of our infrastructure projects were built 50, 60 years ago and were designed for a 50-year service life. They’re dying on schedule. We just haven’t sufficiently upgraded and maintained them.

How does infrastructure intersect with climate change?

Partly, it’s about mitigation; we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, compared to preindustrial levels. It’s a momentous target and you can’t achieve it unless you decarbonize transportation. You’ve got to move to electric vehicles. But it’s also about resilience. It’s about how we build roads and bridges so that they’re not going to topple in extreme weather. Obviously, this carries high costs and won’t benefit us so much as it will our children’s children. That’s historically how we thought about infrastructure. For example, it was probably very hard in New York City in the early 1900s to justify building the subways. But it was understood that the true beneficiaries would be the next generation. We have to think likewise when it comes to infrastructure and climate, which is really an intergenerational issue.

Professor Emeritus and Transportation Policy Expert, Robert Cervero

Historically, we talk about public infrastructure. The nature of public infrastructure is that my private consumption of it benefits the public at large. If I were to consume poor-quality water and get sick, that’s a public cost. If I use public transportation and help reduce traffic, the public benefits. But there’s some gray area, no question. Society is better off having healthy seniors, but the benefit is predominantly to the seniors themselves. We’re all better off with lower carbon emissions from electric cars, but much of the benefit is to the car owner. There’s enough stretching of the definition that it’s no great surprise this has become controversial. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently gave U.S. infrastructure a C- grade. Things like dams and schools got Ds. How did it get so bad?

COURTESY OF ROBERT CERVERO

EARTH:ISTOCK; AUTO PLANET FINDER: ABN IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GREEN BANK : JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PARKES: AMANDA SLATER; LAPTOP: ISTOCK; SPOCK: CBS/PHOTOFEST

The word infrastructure has been in the news a lot since President Biden announced his $2 trillion plan to improve and repair roads, bridges, and tunnels, etc. He also proposes to provide electric vehicle incentives, increase investments in manufacturing, and improve elder care. Do these things fit your definition of infrastructure?

In California, we’ve been trying to build a high-speed rail system for the last 35 years. Meanwhile, other economies—particularly China—are building smart infrastructure at a dizzyingly rapid pace and are now poised to leapfrog well ahead of us. There are reasons China can do this. They’re a communist system. They have a national economic development plan. There’s no public debate. A lot of our infrastructure projects get embroiled in controversy and stopped. It’s not just a matter of public input but also environmental review and labor protection laws and private regulations. We

Are you optimistic that there is enough time and political will to build sustainable infrastructure in this country?

I think we have to be optimistic. And I think the president’s plan is an important step in the right direction. I also think this plan is so large that the incumbents are going to resist it. I’m heartened by the fact that Biden was a longtime senator and learned the art of compromise. I think he went out with a very aggressive plan, realizing the more aggressive he was, the more likely it was that he would get some reasonably bold step forward. To change topics, tell us about your running hobby—or obsession.

In the early 2000s, I was contacted by the Robert Wood Johnson foundation to join an expert advisory panel, which I chaired. The Active Living Research program sponsored interdisciplinary research to help reverse America’s growing obesity epidemic. At seminars, researchers showed that sedentary living was a major contributor to obesity. That was my lifestyle at the time—sitting in an office chair for eight hours a day. I was overweight and stuck in a sloth-like existence. The Active Living movement lit a fire under me. I began running—a half mile, then a mile, then several miles … and quickly got into a virtuous cycle wherein I’d lose some weight, run a bit faster, and then lose even more weight. Within a half year I ran my first marathon. To date, I’ve completed 66 marathons and 112 ultras, mostly on mountainous trails, ranging from 50Ks to 100-milers. While I haven’t run a race in over two years, I still run a lot, albeit slowly, this year averaging over 200 miles a month. —N.A. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 17

Telegraph_SUM21_fnlmt2_crx.indd 17

5/21/21 3:29 PM

Mixed Media

Fugitive Pedagogy By Jarvis R. Givens ’10, Ph.D. ’16

AFTER STEEL MILL CLOSURES IN THE LATE 1970S led to the exodus of nearly

The God Equation By Michio Kaku, Ph.D. ’72 IN HIS LATEST BOOK, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST and master

storyteller Michio Kaku walks readers through humanity’s gradual discovery of the fundamental forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics—before explaining how string theory can unite them all under a single grand framework that might allow us to, as Einstein put it, “read the mind of God.” Kaku has written a book about unified field theory that’s digestible by just about anyone, packed to the brim with colorful metaphors and simple explanations that delight as much as they inform. To hear Kaku tell it, the laws of physics are the harmonies found among the elemental strings of the universe, chemistry, the melodies you make from them, and string theory itself is “cosmic music resonating throughout space-time.” If that’s a bit too woo-woo for you, Kaku gets in plenty of no-nonsense explanation, too, covering topics that range from how electric currents work to how we know that space-time is curved to just what, exactly, these mysterious strings are that might tie the universe in a bow. —K.B.

two-thirds of its residents, Youngstown, Ohio, was plagued by rising crime, widespread housing vacancies, and a sudden drop in civic engagement. But the remaining residents haven’t given up hope. The Place That Makes Us, a documentary film produced by Alexandra Nikolchev, follows a small group of Youngstown community leaders as they fight to revitalize their city. “The easy thing is to flee like everyone does in the Midwest,” says Ian Beniston, executive director of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit that fixes up abandoned homes to attract new residents. “But those of us that are gonna change these places, it’s gonna be the ones that stay and fight.” Crowned “Best of the Festival” at the Arlington International Film Festival, The Place That Makes Us challenges common misconceptions of Rust Belt towns, focusing not on urban blight or the factory closures that rocked the region, but on the hard work and resilience of those who live there. “As cities struggle to emerge after COVID, themes in our film feel as relevant as ever,” says Nikolchev. Originally aired on PBS’s America Reframed series, The Place That Makes Us is now available for streaming on PBS platforms. —M.W.

MM_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 18

— P.J.

5/18/21 3:36 PM

05182021174514

TREPCZYNSKI: ANDRIA LO; TULSA GRAVEYARD: AP PHOTO/MIKE SIMONS/TULSA WORLD

The Place That Makes Us Alexandra Nikolchev ’05

former CAA Achievement Award Scholar and now an assistant professor at Harvard, elucidates the historical struggle of African Americans to educate themselves in spite of staunch white resistance. His title is an interesting one; as Givens notes, our modern word “pedagogy” comes from the ancient Greek, paidagōgos, denoting a slave tasked with accompanying a boy to school. And fugitivity is a powerful idea in Black history, both in terms of the escaped slave as folk hero and the educated mind as a freed spirit. As Frederick Douglass’s master once put it, a slave learning to read was a slave “running away with himself.” As an exemplar of this fugitive spirit, Givens presents the story of Carter G. Woodson (18751950)—teacher, historian, founder of Black History Month, and author of the 1933 treatise, The MisEducation of the Negro. As one reviewer remarked, Givens’s work restores Woodson, now somewhat overlooked, to his “rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.”

STRING THEORY: NATALI ART COLLECTIONS/SHUTTERSTOCK

IN THIS SCHOLARLY WORK, GIVENS, a

Mixed Media

Don’t Let It Get You Down By Savala Nolan Trepczynski, J.D. ’11

TREPCZYNSKI: ANDRIA LO; TULSA GRAVEYARD: AP PHOTO/MIKE SIMONS/TULSA WORLD

STRING THEORY: NATALI ART COLLECTIONS/SHUTTERSTOCK

IN THE 12 ESSAYS that com-

Telegraph

Teran Tease, 5, watches workers excavating a plot at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery as they search for possible mass graves from the 1921 race massacre.

prise Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body, Savala Nolan Trepczynski explores what she calls her “inbetweenness,” navigating the vast, politically charged, and often uncomfortable grey area between the opposing forces in her life: Black and white. Fat and thin. Rich and poor. Trepczynski—a Berkeley Law alumna and the current executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice—invites readers along as she traces her past, reckoning with her anxieties and internalized rage, her lifelong struggle with dieting, and her complex family lineage, which is composed of both enslaved people and slaveholders. In her opening essay, “On Dating White Guys While Me,” Trepczynski autopsies a string of failed relationships with rich, preppy white men and concludes that her early romantic endeavors were not attempts at love, but at selferasure. Don’t Let it Get You Down will be published by Simon & Schuster on July 13, 2021. —M.W.

The Fire and the Forgotten Eric Stover ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, the Greenwood District of

Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street for its thriving Black businesses, was burned to the ground by a racist mob. As many as 300 Black residents were killed and some 10,000 were left homeless. Many survivors were placed in internment camps in the aftermath and the truth of the incident was suppressed for decades. Today, many Black Tulsans are demanding reparations, and efforts are underway to locate and document mass graves from the massacre. Adjunct law professor and war crimes investigator Eric Stover of the Berkeley Human Rights Center joins Washington Post reporter Deneen L. Brown and director Jonathan Silvers to tell the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre and its disturbing legacy in this 90-minute documentary. “This is not some history project for the city,” Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum tells the filmmakers. “This is a murder investigation and we’re trying to find neighbors of ours who got murdered. …” The Fire and the Forgotten premiered on PBS on May 31, the centennial of the atrocity. —P.J.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 19

MM_SUM21_fnlmt_crx.indd 19

5/21/21 3:17 PM

05212021173844

Mixed Media Hunt, Gather, Parent By Michaeleen Doucleff, Ph.D. ’07

DOUDNA: THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY; JJENNER: EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP; COINS: ASSOCIATED PRESS; BEZOS: DENNIS VAN TINE/MEDIAPUNCH/IPX; LOTTO: STRF/STAR MAX/IPX; MUSK: ASSOCIATED PRESS

WANDERLUSTER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF HAS TRAVELED THE WORLD and I’m afraid she has returned with some bad news: You’ve been raising your children all wrong. In this fullhearted account from her travels with her spirited 3-year-old to observe parenting styles in far-flung places like Yucatan and Tanzania, Doucleff discovered that kids in other cultures are, well, better. They’re more helpful, better at sharing, and just generally less annoying. The problem, as always, is you. You’ve given your kids too many toys, you’re not calm enough, you play with them too much. And don’t get me started on your excessive praise. This very morning, when your toddler managed to put a single block back where it belonged, you showered her in high-pitched congratulations. A nod, Doucleff found, suffices in many cultures. There is a grand tradition of books by Americans dismayed by American child-rearing who advocate for the parenting styles of the French or the Danish or some other wealthy, Western, majority-white country. Astronomically popular books like Bringing up Bébé and the Danish Way of Parenting (and the way we devour them) reveal thinly veiled racism when it comes to our ideas about who is, and by extension who is not, a parent worthy of emulation. Doucleff, with her focus on a wider range of cultures and an insistence on not viewing them as “frozen-in-time,” is a breath of fresh air in that regard. Of course, it would be better still to highlight the voices of hunter-gatherer parents themselves. As every journalist knows, there are dangers to “parachuting in,” to believing you understand a culture after a short visit, a danger that Doucleff, a seasoned NPR reporter, seems keenly aware of and sensitive to. I wait with bated breath for Simon & Schuster’s surely forthcoming Inuit guide to child-rearing written by an Inuit woman. In the meantime, Doucleff gets a gentle nod of approval. —Laura Smith

MM_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 20

5/18/21 3:36 PM

05182021174515

a s

h n l

IN HER SOPHISTICATED FICTION, RACHEL KUSHNER ’90

The Hard Crowd

WANDERLUSTER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Telegraph

writes about themes like incarceration, revolution, art, radical politics, and speed (on motorcycles and skis). Kushner has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award—for Telex from Cuba (2008) and The Flamethrowers (2014). Her last novel, The Mars Room (2018), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. As Elliot Frank noted in the Chicago Review of Books, “both the boosters and skeptics of her work shared the assumption that Kushner’s subject material was separate from her own life.” The Hard Crowd banishes that idea. In this new collection of essays written across 20 years, Kushner recounts growing up among a wild crowd in San Francisco, being raised by bohemian academics who lived part-time in a converted school bus in Oregon, and waitressing in a blues bar, “huffing nitrous for kicks while earning $1.85 an hour.” Along the way, Kushner, who enrolled at Berkeley at age 16, espouses her political opinions, praises her favorite authors, and details the adventures of her peers, whose lives were marked by prison, drugs, and premature death. — N.A.

The Code Breaker By Walter Isaacson IN SIXTH GRADE, JENNIFER DOUDNA came home to find a used copy of James Watson’s The Double Helix on her bed. Enraptured by Watson’s account of his and Francis Crick’s quest to crack the genetic code, young Doudna was equally taken by Rosalind Franklin’s underplayed role. “It was an eye-opener,” recalled the future Nobel Prize winner. “Women could be scientists.” The “successful female scientist” is one of many recurrent themes in Walter Isaacson’s nearly 500-page biography of Berkeley’s star chemist. At once a deeply researched portrait of Doudna’s life and a treatise on our modern genetic revolution, The Code Breaker is almost biblical in its grandiosity; indeed Part One begins with an epigraph from Genesis. Which is not entirely unwarranted; Doudna became, in some ways, an almost godlike figure after her 2012 discovery of CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing. Like the Tree of Knowledge, Isaacson suggests, CRISPR has given humans the power to literally rewrite the future of our species—for better or for worse. “Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses?” Isaacson wonders. “Should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and muscles of their kids?” These possibilities and their ethical implications dominate much of the book. Interwoven with references to Orwell, Frankenstein, and the atomic bomb are cautionary tales (notably, the one about a rogue Chinese scientist and the world’s first CRISPR babies) and Isaacson’s own musings. “I was pleased, but also a bit unnerved, to see how easy it was,” he writes of conducting a human gene-editing experiment himself. “Even I could do it!” It is, perhaps, this idea of democratizing CRISPR that gives The Code Breaker its raison d’être: Isaacson emphasizes the inevitability of our genetically modified future and the importance of bringing everyone into the conversation. “All of us, including you and me,” he writes. “Figuring out if and when to edit our genes will be one of the most consequential questions of the twenty-first century, so I thought it would be useful to understand how it’s done.” —Leah Worthington

Jackpot By Michael Mechanic ’87, MJ ’94 STRIKING IT RICH IS PART AND PARCEL of the

American dream—or fantasy—and Americans spend tens of billions of dollars annually chasing it—on the Lottery. In reality, the richest one percent of Americans have a lock on almost 40 percent of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom 90 percent claim barely a quarter. Michael Mechanic, senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, probes wealth inequality in the United States with a character-driven story gleaned from dozens of interviews with some of the richest people on the planet and their acolytes. The book’s ensemble cast includes the likes of Bentley dealers, sports agents, lobbyists, lottery winners, and even a woman who gives combat training to the nannies of billionaires. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer calls the book an “entertaining and eviscerating peek behind the velvet curtains and into the real lives of America’s Super-Rich.”

—Dano Nissen CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 21

MM_SUM21_fnlmt_crx.indd 21

5/21/21 3:17 PM

05212021173945

Approved with warnings

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RESTAINO 22 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

bigpic_SUM21_fnl2.indd 22

5/14/21 10:25 AM

05142021134833

Telegraph

FIRE WITH FIRE: After decades of overzealous fire suppression, forest managers are increasingly embracing the indigenous practice of prescribed burning as a tool for reducing the dangerous buildup of fuels. The fire shown here, burning through mixed conifer forest in the UC-managed Blodgett Forest Research Station on the Georgetown Divide 140 miles east of Berkeley, was intentionally set last December after careful consideration of conditions such as wind, humidity, and fuel moisture. As Research Stations Manager Ariel Roughton ’12 explained, foresters look for conditions that are “dry enough to consume dead fuels and understory shrubs and trees, but not so dry as to damage the overstory.” This particular fire burned close to 40 acres at low intensity over two days and researchers measured fuel loads both before and afterward. Says Roughton, “we aim to burn whenever conditions are right.” The hope is that more “good fires” like these can help minimize the catastrophic wildfires that have raged across California in recent years. —P.J. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 23

bigpic_SUM21_fnl2_crx.indd 23

5/21/21 2:55 PM

05212021170007

IRIDE PIERETTI / EYEEM

Last Will 24 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 24

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183521

I want to decide when to let go of my life.

IRIDE PIERETTI / EYEEM

By Ruth Dixon-Mueller

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 25

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 25

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183522

Debora ended her life on a clear spring night in a Japanese hotel in San Francisco.

She had sent her farewells to a few of us— close friends and her sister’s family—and left final instructions on the table beside the bed. Just after midnight, she drank two small bottles of the barbiturate, Nembutal, washed down the bitter taste with fruit juice, fastened a plastic bag over her head, and lay down on the bed to die. She knew it would be quick. “Please don’t call it suicide,” Debora wrote in a note she left for the coroner. “Call it a voluntary death.” Two days later the coroner telephoned Debora’s sister in Italy. “I’m sorry,” he told her, “I have to check suicide as the cause. But you should know that she did everything right. She gets an A-plus.” Debora would have been pleased. She had been planning her death for years: not morbidly, not out of depression, but out of a calm conviction that she could choose her own time to die. “So how much is enough?” she had written to us earlier. “Is living every single breath worth of life until the bitter end the right way? Can I be totally in love with this day of fall and not feel like I need to see every fall from now on? … Will my loved ones get it that I may be done and that my passing is not personal? Has anyone ever heard me say, ‘I want to grow old’?” At 65, Debora was not old, by most counts, nor was she ill. But she was a passionate advocate for personal autonomy in how she chose to end her life, just as she had been for women’s reproductive rights and LGBT causes. In the college town down the coast where she lived, she collected signatures for California’s medical

aid-in-dying law, the End of Life Option Act. The card she passed out was as direct as she was: DEATH & DYING 101. Death cafés, group discussions. End of Life paperwork presentations. Death with Dignity.

The California campaign appealed to Debora’s sense of righteousness. Based on Oregon’s 1997 Death with Dignity Act, the 2016 End of Life Option Act allows certain terminally ill persons to end their lives with a lethal medication prescribed by a physician. Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have similar laws. But, as committed as she was, Debora knew it wouldn’t work for her. She was not willing to wait until she was already dying to request a “death with dignity.” When might that be? Her mother, long lost in a fog, died in a nursing home at age 99. Nor was she willing to leave it up to doctors to decide: it was her body, her choice. The leading advocacy organization for medical aid-in-dying laws, Compassion & Choices, cites “empowerment” and “autonomy at life’s end” as key values and organizing principles. The word “patient” alerts

26 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 26

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183523

us to who’s in charge, however. How much autonomy do we, as patients, really have? To be eligible, we must be a legal resident of a state with a medical aid-in-dying law; solicit the sponsorship of our primary care physician plus another physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist; and be certified as having fewer than six months to live. In California, at least, we must demonstrate that we are aware of—and have tried or refused—all other options such as surgery, radiation, or fluids that might keep us alive, and have tried or refused palliative or hospice care. And we must show that we are lucid and not acting out of coercion, impaired judgment, depression, or other mental illness. If we get this far, we can request a prescription for the lethal drug. But we must do this on two separate occasions, at least 15 days apart, both orally and in writing. We must sign a consent form in front of witnesses, and be capable of consuming the drug without Deciding in advance that I will end my life assistance. If we’re approved, does not mean that I am depressed or in and are still alive by then, we’ll need of rescue: It means that I am ready to be given a prescription to fill depart this life willingly, on good terms. and pay for—if, that is, our physician and/or health care facility does not refuse to comply “for reasons of conscience, morality, or ethics.” And there’s the rub: Death with Dignity laws protect the rights of individual providers and entire healthcare systems to refuse to honor our request on grounds of individual or institutional conscience. The American Medical Association goes further: according to its Code of Medical Ethics, “Physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” As patients, we have the freedom to request medical aid-in-dying, but we have no right to receive it. If we’re determined to make an autonomous decision about how to end our lives, we need to manage it ourselves.

The themes of empowerment and autonomy run through much of my writing and international consulting on women’s rights and population policies. The theme is a personal one as well: I have thrived on the capacity to make choices in my life. Now, at age 83 and in good health, I refuse to accept the prospect of losing that independence. Dementia poses a particular threat: I need to have all my wits about me to die

peacefully, on my own terms, when, and how I want to. The high-rise senior living community in which I live offers the best in lifetime care. But the cascade of small indignities— currently a trickle—will become a torrent. “For most people,” writes Atul Gawande in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, “death comes only after long medical struggle with an ultimately unstoppable condition—advanced cancer, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, progressive organ failure … or just the accumulating debilities of very old age.” And then? “In all such cases,” he says, “death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost.” Deciding in advance that I will end my life by a specific birthday, or when certain signs of cognitive or physical decline appear, does not mean that I am depressed or in need of rescue. Quite the contrary: It means that I am ready to depart this life willingly, on good terms. To me, selecting a departure date rather than struggling with uncertainty until the medical battle is lost is an affirmation of my life, not a negation of it. Indeed, it relieves me of anxiety, knowing that I have a plan in place. Cheers me, even. And so, like Debora, I’m writing my own story.

“Plan ahead,” urges writer and activist Derek Humphry in his book Final Exit 2020: Self-Deliverance and Assisted Dying for the Terminally and Hopelessly Ill (first published in 1991), “and then enjoy the rest of your life!” We don’t have to be terminal, though—or even ill—to end our lives thoughtfully, “safely,” and in a place of our choosing. Final Exit is filled with ethical as well as practical advice. Share our thoughts with loved ones and close friends, for example: “Do not surprise or shock them with a fait accompli,” even if they don’t know all the details, Humphry advises. Put our legal, financial, and personal affairs in order before we go; do not leave a mess for others to deal with. Select a method of “selfdeliverance” that is safe and certain; do not resort to dangerous or “bizarre” actions that can leave us damaged but not dead, or harm others. Leave a signed and dated declaration of the voluntary nature of our death, along with evidence of what we have done to accomplish it. Write instructions about what to do for whoever finds us. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 27

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 27

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183524

SLIPPERY SLOPES AND OTHER CONCERNS A Q&A on the ethics of aid-in-dying with Dr. Guy Micco by Leah Worthington

What are the main arguments against allowing aid-in-dying? Those who believe that we are only caretakers of our own lives, that this life is a gift from God, see it as morally wrong to hasten the end; for God is the only ‘One’ who can properly decide when we die. Some disability activists find medical aid-in-dying (MAID) an affront to the dignity of those with severe disabilities whose lives might be seen by others as “not worth living.” Such an attitude leads to a discounting of the life of someone with a disability; further, it can be internalized by that person. Some secular bioethicists, physicians, and others believe that physicians should never be in a position to take life. They point to the fact that good palliative care and hospice are very successful at controlling severe pain, shortness

of breath, and other physical symptoms at end-of-life. Further, they may point out that there is a “slippery slope” in play: First, assisted death for the terminally ill, competent person. Then, assisted death for the non-terminally ill, competent person. Then, we move to assisted death for the person who cannot truly give their consent because of, say, dementia or coma. Finally, we become so inured to killing that we have involuntary euthanasia (killing against the will of the person), as seen in Nazi concentration camps. How do you respond to the fear of a slippery slope? The slippery slope argument was recently made anew in an editorial in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine (2020) by geriatrician and palliative care physician Diane Meier.

She points out the problem of imperfect safeguards, or the impossibility of safeguards, surrounding the extension of euthanasia beyond terminal illness for a consenting adult; further, she says that this is already happening in the Netherlands. Letters from Dutch physicians, in response to her editorial, claim this is not the case. But having watched the use of MAID in our community, I tend to agree: Safeguards, such as assuring a patient’s consent and desire for MAID, are in place. Abuses can be prevented. However, I do have a lingering concern as articulated by the disability community. Which concerns do you think are most valid and why? I am quite sympathetic to the view of disability activists: First give us the right to a decent life, then talk to us about a “right to die.” Fear of severe disability and age-related illness is nearuniversal, including among physicians. This may result in “the unconscious projection of support for a hastened death” (Meier)—a version of, “Of course you want to die, no one would want to live like you’re living. Let us help you.” If the life of a person with a severe disability is thought not worth living, how easy might it be to push that person toward MAID? The same might be said regarding elders toward the end of their lives: “You’ve lived a good life. Why are you hanging on?” More and better education for us all regarding disability, old age, and the meaning of “quality of life,” along with appropriate safeguards for MAID, go a long way toward alleviating my concerns. But in the end, the question is one for society to answer: Should the value of autonomous decision-making take precedence over safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable? And, if so, what safeguards must be in place to prevent abuses?

AP PHOTO/RICH PEDRONCELLI

As of 2016, the California End of Life Option Act offers legal protection to residents suffering from terminal illness who wish to access medical aid-in-dying, also known as physician-assisted suicide. But the law has hardly quelled the controversy. We spoke with Dr. Guy Micco, co-director of the Program for Medical Humanities at Berkeley who has had a longstanding interest in aging and death, about the ethical concerns in legalizing life-ending treatment.

28 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 28

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183525

On the practical side, we should know what our state laws say about suicide, autopsies, insurance policies, and related matters. Although the laws differ by state, nowhere in the U.S. is taking your own life illegal, nor is it illegal for someone to tell us how to do it, or to be with us when we do. But directly helping someone to die—by fixing a plastic bag over the head, say, or lifting a glass up to the mouth or giving an injection—is a crime almost everywhere. Asking others to do this for us can put them in jeopardy. Final Exit explains in detail how to manage things ourselves: what methods are “safe” (i.e., effective and quick), where to obtain them, and how to supplement, prepare, and use them to ensure a calm departure. It recommends having someone accompany us when we take the final step. If we’re reluctant to ask this of anyone we know personally, but don’t wish to be alone, we can contact the Final Exit Network—a national orga“Why at this advanced stage of old age nization Humphry founded in do I have to add to my anxieties 2004—for help. Trained volbecause we have neither social policy unteers, called “exit guides,” nor a culture that permits us to die will interview us to ensure when we say, ‘I’ve had enough’?” that we have explored all other avenues and that our wish to die is purely voluntary. They can advise us about making final arrangements, how and by whom our body should be discovered, and how the death will be reported. They can tell us what to procure, and where, but cannot provide or touch it. And if all goes well in the interview, they can be with us at the end to ensure that our leave-taking is a smooth one. As I conjure my own end-of-life story, I fantasize about flying to Switzerland on a one-way ticket. In a village near Zurich, the nonprofit organization Dignitas offers what it calls an “accompanied suicide” as a means to “self-determination … at life’s end.” I doubt that they’re likely to take me if I’m not seriously ill or in pain, however, no matter how determined I may be. And so I’m imagining a different ending that keeps me closer to home: I could follow the footsteps of my friend Lillian.

But I was afraid. What if it didn’t work? What if I didn’t take enough? What if I threw up? And here I am, about to turn 90. Now what?” Lillian had written about her intentions—and what she hoped she would have “the courage to do.” “Why at this advanced stage of old age do I have to add to my anxieties because we have neither social policy nor a culture that permits us to die when we say, ‘I’ve had enough’?” she wrote. “I ask my doctor to give me a prescription for pills that will make my death easy. He thinks about it, and then with a look I can’t read—sheepishness? regret?—he says, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’ I assure him that I don’t plan to take my life immediately; I only want to be in control when it happens, to know I won’t have to leave it to people like him to make a decision that should be mine.” When she turned 90, Lillian contacted the Florida-based Final Exit Network. She had read about the options beforehand and decided to use helium. After buying the plastic turkey-roasting bag, an athletic band to hold it around her neck, clear plastic tubing, and tape, she purchased two small tanks of helium online packed with balloons from a party store. At home she assembled the kit and practiced opening and shutting the valves. Two Final Exit Network volunteers were with her at the end. They had interviewed her earlier to make sure she knew what she was doing and had everything ready: that her daughter knew of her plans; that her affairs were in order; and that she was not depressed. And when the time came, Lillian did everything right. She died the way she wanted to, peacefully—even proudly—in her own bed. Lillian was not ill, at least not terminally, but she was old. She had lived a full and creative life, but was no longer the person she used to be, or wanted to be, or wanted her friends and family to see. She was certain about that. “My big question,” she had written earlier, “is only: Will I be able to translate that certainty into action?” Yes, she was. And she did. It was an autonomous choice, just as she planned it.

AP PHOTO/RICH PEDRONCELLI

Lillian was 89 when she first told me of her plans. We were drinking a glass of wine in her San Francisco condominium with a glorious view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. “You know, I was going to do it earlier this year,” she confided in me. “I’ve been saving sleeping pills and have quite a stash.

Ruth Dixon-Mueller, ’64, Ph.D ’70, taught sociology at UC Davis for 18 years before moving to Costa Rica, where she spent another 18 years growing coffee and organic pineapples. She lives in Oakland.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 29

Death_SUM21_fnlmt.indd 29

5/20/21 4:23 PM

05202021183525

MEN BEHAVING BADLY

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGIST DAVID BUSS ON THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT BY JULIA M. KLEIN IN MARCH, FACING MULTIPLE COMPLAINTS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT , New York’s

three-term Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, issued an apology. “I never knew at the time that I was making anyone feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I never, ever meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone or cause anyone pain.” To many, the apology seemed only to underline Cuomo’s cluelessness—or disingenuousness. How could he not have known that sexually charged conversations with subordinates, some of them young enough to be his grandchildren, were bound to offend? Evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, Ph.D. ’81, has some answers. “On average, men find women more attractive than women find men,” says Buss, 68, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Studies also have found that men tend to prefer women younger than themselves—and, as they grow older, their preferred age gap increases. Men in this situation tend to commit “mind-reading errors,” Buss says, finding it “unfathomable that the woman is not also attracted to them.” A male

30 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 30

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164745

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 31

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 31

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164800

“sexual over-perception bias” could have led Cuomo to mistake a friendly or ambiguous signal, such as a smile, for sexual receptiveness. “Not all men are equally susceptible to the sexual over-perception bias,” Buss adds. “What we found in our lab study is that men who are most inclined to do this are high in narcissism.” Other research shows that men with status or wealth “feel a sense of entitlement,” and “have this psychological proclivity to feel that the rules are made for other people, not for them,” he says. In other words: When you’re a star, they let you do it. One of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, Buss details these ideas in a new, ripped-from-the-headlines book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault (Little, Brown Spark). Juxtaposing more than three decades of laboratory research with case studies from the animal kingdom, hunter-gatherer societies, and the Wild West of internet dating, he lays out a theory of sexual conflict between men and women involving a coevolutionary arms race. Evolutionary psychologists maintain that natural selection and sexual selection have favored specific traits and tendencies. One of the discipline’s core tenets is that reproductive biology has given rise to psychological differences between men and women—such as the male desire for sexual variety and the female preference for longterm commitment—that enhance mating success. Conflicts naturally arise because what is good for women is not always good for men, and vice versa. Our modern cultural environment may have exacerbated these conflicts, Buss argues, leading to widespread sexual harassment, stalking, assault, and rape— patterns of conduct that the #MeToo movement and societies around the world have only just begun to confront. But Buss notes that he has been studying these issues for years. “The cultural zeitgeist happens to be coinciding with my work,” he says. With its emphasis on human universals, evolutionary psychology has long been criticized for downplaying the role of culture, or for failing to disentangle culture and biology. Feminists have taken the discipline to task for what they see as an

endorsement of gender-based distinctions and a sexist status quo. And there remain strong academic currents of what Buss calls “sex difference denialism,” exemplified by books such Gina Rippon’s Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (2019), which emphasizes brain plasticity, and Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (2017). Fine suggests that the social impact of overstating evolutionary differences is the denigration of women’s professional ambitions. In this new book, his first in a decade, Buss confronts such criticisms directly, positing a complex relationship between patriarchal cultural institutions and evolved psychology. He also seeks to identify the personality types of men most likely to transgress against women. Far from endorsing the status quo, Buss writes that he hopes to raise consciousness and spur change, to “reduce the occurrence of sexual conflict and heal the harms it creates.”

WITH ITS EMPHASIS ON HUMAN UNIVERSALS, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY HAS LONG BEEN CRITICIZED FOR DOWNPLAYING THE ROLE OF CULTURE, OR FOR FAILING TO DISENTANGLE CULTURE AND BIOLOGY.

IN THE 1970S AND EARLY 1980S, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DID NOT YET EXIST. “No one studied human

mating strategies, and sex differences were believed to be trivial or nonexistent,” Buss wrote in a 2003 paper, “Sexual Strategies: A Journey into Controversy,” in the journal Psychological Inquiry. “If there was a nature to humans, according to mainstream assumptions, it was that humans had no fundamental nature. People were plastic, formless, passive receptacles whose adult form was achieved solely by input that occurred during development.” Buss himself has been integral to changing these attitudes. “David is the world’s foremost researcher on the psychology of sexuality,” says Steven Pinker, the renowned Harvard professor and experimental cognitive psychologist. “He has a grasp of deep ideas from evolutionary biology, insight into human motives and emotions, ingenuity about research methods, and the right combination of moral seriousness and goodnatured humor.”

32 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 32

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164800

Buss describes his own nature as rebellious. Born in Indianapolis, he moved repeatedly as a child—from Pittsburgh to northern New Jersey to Austin—each time his father, a psychology professor, switched jobs. His mother, a homemaker, worked with the NAACP to combat housing discrimination. Buss’s adolescence was bumpy. “My grades absolutely plummeted, in part because of the peer group that I got involved with,” he says. He dropped out of high school after two marijuana possession arrests (both times the charges were dropped) but earned a diploma at night school. Matriculating at the University of Texas, he finally found his academic footing. He encountered evolutionary theory—“the first intellectual idea that mesmerized me,” he says—in a freshman geology class. His 1975 psychology term paper, “Dominance and Access to Women,” made the then-novel argument that men competed for status to gain sexual access to women. At Berkeley, Buss focused on personality psychology. One of his mentors, Jeanne H. Block, was a leading exponent of the idea that sex differences were the result of socialization, not biology. But as an assistant professor at Harvard, Buss met others who shared his evolutionary outlook— including the husband-and-wife team of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides and the entomologist E.O. Wilson, author of the controversial 1975 book Sociobiology, which emphasized the biological roots of social behavior. Buss also incorporated into his lectures the ground-breaking 1970s work of the anthropologist Donald Symons, on the evolution of human sexuality, and the biologist Robert Trivers, on sexual selection and parental investment. Buss’s breakthrough was a collaborative multiyear study of mating preferences, the International Mate Selection Project, encompassing 10,047 subjects from 37 cultures. (“My Nigerian colleague wished to know whether I sought mate preferences for a man’s first wife, second wife, or third wife,” Buss noted wryly in Psychological Inquiry.) Published in 1989, after Buss had moved to the University of Michigan, the study demonstrated that men universally valued youth and physical attractiveness in women—presumptive markers of fertility. Women, by

contrast, sought long-term mates with high status and economic resources to provide for them and their offspring. Buss came to believe, he wrote in Psychological Inquiry, “that mating was the center of the psychological universe”—and that men and women had different sexual psychologies. Over the years, he refined and expanded his theories, looking, for example, at the varied mating strategies—both long- and short-term—employed by men and women. Buss (who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1996) has written several books for popular audiences: The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion (on jealousy), The Murderer Next Door (on homicide), and, with Cindy M. Meston, Why Women Have Sex. He also authored a textbook, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, the first, and still the dominant text, in the field. Buss’s research has given him insight into his own behavior, too. He describes himself as “basically, exclusively, a longterm mating guy”—divorced, with two children; widowed when his second wife died of cancer after a 20-year marriage, and now in a “very happy” more than eight-yearlong partnership with another professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “For much of my life, I’ve been very shy with women,” Buss reflects. Evolutionary psychology predicts that women will prefer self-confident men, since self-confidence is a cue to status. And as he attained professional success, Buss says, “I’ve shown more self-confidence in approaching women who strongly attract me.”

WHEN MEN BEHAVE BADLY IS, IN PART, the

product of Buss’s growing consciousness of the prevalence and impact of sexual assault and harassment. So many women he knew “had been touched by sexual violence,” he says. “The range was tremendous, from mild to horrific. But I saw the psychological scars it created.” Buss remembers a friend of his college girlfriend “sobbing hysterically about being sexually abused.” He heard a girlfriend consoling her best friend, who “screamed

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 33

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 33

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164800

“ADAPTIVE DOES NOT MEAN MORALLY GOOD. IDENTIFYING EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF NEFARIOUS BEHAVIOR IN NO WAY JUSTIFIES OR EXCUSES IT.”

WHEN HE FIRST CONCEIVED OF WRITING A BOOK ON SEXUAL CONFLICT, Buss figured he would try to be even-

handed—to note, for example, that both men and women engage in tactics designed to enhance their mating prospects. Women’s efforts to avoid what Buss calls “subpar males” or their requirement of “extensive courtship displays before consenting to sex” have inspired male adaptations designed “to circumvent these barriers,” including lying about their income and their interest in commitment, he writes in When

Men Behave Badly. Women, too, engage in deception—for instance, by under-reporting their weight or posting photoshopped or old pictures on dating sites, he says. But the even-handedness Buss contemplated had its limits, he discovered. “When you get to sexual violence,” Buss says, “it is the case that men are primarily the perpetrators, and women are primarily the victims.” Predator-prey analogies, gleaned from the animal kingdom, are “disturbingly on point,” he writes, and help explain behavior such as sexual harassment, stalking, rape, and intimate partner violence. Stalking and violence may arise from male jealousy, provoked by fears of sexual infidelity, mate defection, and paternity uncertainty. Studies have shown that female jealousy, by contrast, focuses more strongly on emotional infidelity, linked to the possibility of losing male investment in current or future offspring. Another trigger of violent, controlling, or abusive behavior is what Buss calls “matevalue discrepancy,” which can be aggravated by changing circumstances. A man who loses his job, for example, might worry that his diminished resources would impel a partner to “mate switch”—that is, trade him in for a newer, more prosperous model. One ongoing (if somewhat arcane) discussion within evolutionary psychology concerns whether men have evolved specific rape adaptations because sexual aggression results in more offspring. The alternative view is that rape is instead a byproduct of such factors as the male desire for sexual variety and low-investment sex. Parsing the evidence, Buss prefers the byproduct theory, and argues that rape could be reduced by “[a] diminution of patriarchal ideology, stronger enforceable laws, greater police sensitivity to victims of sex crimes, and a more educated populace.” Throughout the book, Buss insists that evolutionary psychology should not be tarred by the so-called naturalistic fallacy, which confounds what is with what should be. “Adaptive … does not mean morally good,” he writes. “Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excuses it.” Buss also aims to present a nuanced view of the relationship between culture and sexual psychology. The failure of patriarchal legal systems to recognize spousal rape, for example, is an artifact of “men

34 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 34

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164801

ISTOCK PHOTO

in rage and anguish for hours,” after being raped by two strangers. Yet another girlfriend told him she had been raped by someone she met in a bar. A former partner revealed a history of repeated rape that led to chronic “black hole” depression. He recalls examples of sexual harassment as well: Four female graduate students complaining to their department chair about a male professor’s unwelcome advances. A graduate student told by an interviewer that he could not hire her “because he wanted to ask her out, and he couldn’t do so if she were in his employ.” During Buss’s undergrad years, professors threw keg parties where teaching assistants would have “their arms draped around the undergraduates,” he says. And it was not unusual for professors themselves to sleep with undergraduates. “I started talking to more and more women, some close female friends, some just women I knew. And many confided in me,” Buss says. “I started to realize how pervasive various forms of sexual violence were.” He published a 2011 paper, “The Costs of Rape,” examining its traumatic aftermath. “Even though I think of myself as empathic for a man,” he says, “I realized that, at some level, I had been clueless. And, undoubtedly, I still am clueless, since I don’t think it’s possible for a man to fully grasp how psychologically devastating these things are to women.”

n d

with an evolved sexual psychology that prioritizes their rights,” he says. “Once those laws exist, though, they do exert a social pressure.” By the same token, changing legal and social norms can discourage patriarchal or sexist behavior. In fact, human beings are intensely responsive to such factors as social reputation and group consensus, if only because reputation bears on mating success. (Accusations of sexual misconduct, one might recall, led to divorces for men such as the

n t e d n -

m l y t e o n

r n y a m

) d l e a e . e e f e f

d e l n

ISTOCK PHOTO

t e , d y y -

film producer Harvey Weinstein and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.) “Sexual psychology gets played out in a social and cultural context,” Buss says, and contemporary developments such as the #MeToo movement are sending tremors through government, academe, Hollywood, publishing, and the rest of the culture. Not all men, of course, are guilty of offensive conduct against women. To pinpoint those who are, Buss returns to personality theory and the research of Delroy L. Paulhus, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver (who did a sabbatical at Berkeley). Paulhus has identified three subclinical personality types whom he calls the “Dark Triad”: men high in narcissism (marked by a sense of personal entitlement), Machiavellianism (the tendency to manipulate and exploit), and psychopathy (lack of

empathy). In a 2002 paper with Kevin M. Williams, Paulhus called these “overlapping but distinct constructs.” (He and two collaborators have since added “everyday sadism,” making for a “Dark Tetrad.”) In Buss’s view, it is Dark Triad men who are most apt to sexually harass, stalk, assault, and rape women. Geographic mobility and the potential for anonymity in urban settings have made Dark Triad personalities harder to detect and ostracize, Buss hypothesizes. And women living alone, lacking the “kin protection” of their huntergatherer ancestors, are more vulnerable to their predations. Modern life may be spawning an increase in “a psychopathic strategy,” Buss says. “It’s just easier for men to get away with deception,” and worse. Buss says he used to consider himself a pure scientist, uninterested in applications of his work. But that has changed. “Over time,” he says, “I’ve actually realized that this work has profound implications for solving some real social problems, and I think sexual violence against women is … the most pervasive human rights problem in the world.” Not that scientific knowledge is “a magic bullet that’s going to cure everything. … [But] the assumption that male and female sexual psychologies are identical is a harmful position to take, given that we know that they are not.” There are lessons in evolutionary psychology for both men and women, Buss suggests. Learning about such phenomena as “the male tendency to infer interest where there is none” can be helpful, he says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be able to prevent experiencing the bias, but you might be able to correct it.” (Andrew Cuomo, take note.) “In an ideal world,” Buss adds, women would be free not to worry that certain behaviors, such as imbibing intoxicants or rejecting undesirable suitors, might subject them to male sexual aggression or coercion. But, in our world, he says, “not informing women about the circumstances in which they’re at risk is morally problematic, to put it mildly.” Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Slate, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @ JuliaMKlein.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 35

Men_SUM21_fnl.indd 35

5/21/21 2:38 PM

05212021164801

36 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

JOE_SUM21_fnl.indd 36

5/19/21 9:44 AM

05192021114551

TING BET ON E ATUR

LITER

Joe Di Prisco, Ph.D. ’86, brings street smarts to writing and literary outreach. By Paul Wilner

WHEN HE WAS A GRAD STUDENT IN BERKELEY

Photograph by Marcus Hanschen

in the 1970s and ’80s, pursuing his Ph.D. in English, Joe Di Prisco would often duck out of Wheeler Hall to place bets on sports games from campus pay phones. It wasn’t the only angle he was working back then. Di Prisco was also part of a local card-counting crew that hit blackjack tables from Vegas to the Caribbean to South Africa’s Sun City, where his success at the tables finally gained too much notice and he was barred from casinos—not just in South Africa, but back in the states as well. Gambling may not sound like a promising avocation for a young scholar-in-training, but Di Prisco didn’t just survive the rigors of academia, he flourished, completing his dissertation on Mark Twain, advised by English Professor Frederick Crews (best known for The Pooh Perplex, his satiric takedown of academic pomposity), while racking up a slew of awards. He was a James

Phelan Fellow in Art, two-time winner of the Eisner Prize in Poetry and Prose, and a five-time winner of the Samuel C. Irving Prize for American Wit and Humor. Decades later, Di Prisco quietly added to the roster of literary awards associated with Cal when he spearheaded the Simpson Literary Project, a far-reaching collaboration between Berkeley’s English department and the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation. Named for the late Bay Area philanthropist Barclay Simpson and his wife Sharon Simpson, the project, rechristened in 2021 the New Literary Project, sponsors the annual Joyce Carol Oates Prize, which carries a $50,000 cash award for “emerged and still emerging” fiction writers. Di Prisco is an author in his own right, and a rather prolific one at that, with 11 volumes to his name, including fiction, poetry, and two co-written books on teenage CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 37

JOE_SUM21_fnl.indd 37

5/19/21 9:44 AM

05192021114552

psychology. The latter is a subject he knows well from two decades spent teaching English at middle and high schools, including seven years at San Francisco’s prestigious University High. He also wrote two memoirs, Subway to California (2014) and The Pope of Brooklyn (2017), both of which mine his family’s Brooklyn roots and his father’s run-ins with the law. In the summer of 1961, 10-year-old Joseph Di Prisco was walking down a country road near his grandparents’ Long Island farm with his father and younger brother, John, when they saw that their house “was surrounded by black and white police cars and other … chariots of law enforcement,” he recalls in Subway to California. “It would take longer, much longer, for me to have a clue as to what the FBI wanted with my father and what it was that drove us far from home.” He later learned that his father, a gambler and bookmaker, was a star witness and an informant in a case against corrupt cops who were shaking down bookmakers. The senior Di Prisco, known around his Greenpoint neighborhood as “Pope,” thought it best to hit the road, rather than face the twin prospects of testifying in open court and potential mob retaliation. Rather than surrender to authorities, he took off cross-country, landing 3,000 miles away in Berkeley. Growing up, Di Prisco attended parochial schools. After graduating from Saint Mary’s College High School, he did a stint as a novitiate at the Christian Brothers monastery in Napa Valley. “It wasn’t a good fit,’’ Di Prisco said of his short-lived vocation. “One day, the abbot called me in, and said, ‘Brother Joseph, you make too many jokes.’” From the monastery he went to Syracuse University in 1969, where he mixed activism with literary aspirations, managing to graduate summa cum laude despite an incident in which he and fellow demonstrators seized the school administration office. His mentor at Syracuse, noted essayist and Cal alumnus George P. Elliott ’39, M.A. ’41, wrote a glowing recommendation for him to his alma mater. “He wrote me a very nice letter of recommendation, a twoline recommendation … they were pretty damn good,” Di Prisco says. It probably didn’t hurt that Elliott also put in a good word for his protégé with poet and Cal faculty member Josephine Miles, one of the towering figures of the English department. Di Prisco was accepted to Berkeley in 1973. The aforementioned awards

notwithstanding, the path to his doctorate was a struggle. He still vividly recalls the hostility he braved from one professor on his oral examination committee. He insisted on immediately retaking the orals and he passed, graduating from the program in 1986. Di Prisco first met Sharon Simpson at a dinner party in the early ’90s hosted by their mutual friend Katharine Michaels and her late husband, the celebrated novelist and Berkeley Professor Leonard Michaels. “We were guests, along with Joe and Patti, for dinner … and we just fell in love with each other and hit it off right away,” Simpson says. “I was on the [California Shakespeare Theatre] board … and so I approached him a couple months later and said, ‘Joe, would you be interested in being on our board?’ … He said, ‘yes,’ and we were thrilled.”

“Writing a novel is like opening up a business. A poem is like shoplifting.” — Joe Di Prisco

Di Prisco, in turn, approached Simpson with the idea of the literary project. He knew of her husband Barclay’s love of books and support for libraries and wanted to do this in his honor, Simpson recalls. “I sort of didn’t know what to say ... I told him up front I wouldn’t be contributing to it, that I already had so many irons in the fire and commitments I’d made to other organizations,” she says. “And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, that’s fine.’ So, of course, all these years later, I am involved—and yes, I do give them a little bit of money.” She’s amused by Di Prisco’s unconventional background and enjoys his largerthan-life persona, adding that Joe and his glamorous wife, Patti, cut quite a figure (“like something out of the ’40s”) even in mundane moments like driving to the grocery store in Joe’s prized Maserati. She was also impressed by his success in recruiting legendary author Joyce Carol Oates, a visiting professor at Cal between her regular Princeton duties. “Berkeley was an alternate reality to me,” Oates recalled via email, adding that Di Prisco made her feel welcome in her “somewhat ‘borrowed’ milieu.” The two grew even closer after they team-taught

38 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

JOE_SUM21_fnl.indd 38

5/19/21 9:44 AM

05192021114552

a memoir course together at the Lafayette Library in spring 2019. “He did seem somewhat, to my husband Charlie Gross, to be a transplanted (fellow) Brooklyn-ite, which was most welcome. (Little did we know at the time of our first meeting that Joe’s family background might have been filmed by Martin Scorsese in the mode of Goodfellas…).” Oates is excited by the Simpson Foundation’s deep and “somewhat unusual” commitment to mid-career, mid-list writers. “Helping ‘emerging ’ writers is at least as crucial as helping new writers, of course—in some cases, the ‘emerging’ writer may be facing more difficulties than the beginning writer.” In 2017, the inaugural winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize—originally called the Simpson Literary Prize—was Cal alumnus T. Geronimo Johnson, M.A. ’11, whose

exuberant novel Welcome to Braggsville was hailed in the New York Times as “the funniest sendup of identity politics, the academy and white racial anxiety to hit the scene in years.” Johnson—who has taught writing at Stanford and Cal, where he delivered the 2017 English department commencement address—described Di Prisco in an email as “one of literature’s ambassadors-at-large.” He added: “Joe is a fine poet and prose writer, but also a hell of a poker player and a man of the people. I realize that’s a slippery term at the moment, but this is Joe’s most admirable quality; he straddles the academy and the real world, engages people in both camps with equal enthusiasm, and treats everyone with equal respect. The success of the Simpson Literary Project and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize is due in no small part to Joe’s ability to take people as they are and bring out their best.” Subsequent awardees include Anthony Marra in 2018, Laila Lalami in 2019, Daniel Mason in 2020, and Danielle Evans in 2021. According to the prize announcement, Evans, author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, will take

up short-term residency at Berkeley during the spring semester of 2022. There’s more to the New Literary Project than just the prize. Other efforts include the annual Simpsonistas story anthology featuring work by Oates Prize winners and finalists and from writing workshops in libraries and schools, including Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall. And Di Prisco recently produced a filmed performance called “Shakespeare & the Plague.” As The Norton Shakespeare editor, Professor Stephen Greenblatt— formerly of Berkeley, now at Harvard— reminds viewers in the introduction to the mash-up, the Bard “lived his whole life in the shadow of the plague.” These projects haven’t deterred Di Prisco from pursuing his own literary efforts and ambitions, which are lofty. As his longtime editor and fellow Cal alum Regan McMahon ’74, M.A. ’76, puts it: “Joe tackles the big issues—life, death, family, God—from all angles: through poetry, comedy, memoir, novels, even nonfiction works that explore the emotions of adolescents.” McMahon says she wouldn’t be surprised if Di Prisco had many more manuscripts that he hasn’t yet gotten around to showing her in the study of his Lafayette home. In fact, Di Prisco has lately turned to a relatively new form for him: the short story. “When the pandemic hit, I [was] discombobulated like everybody else,” he recalls. “And I looked at some recent poems of mine and I said, ‘These are stories.’ … Writing a novel is like opening up a business. A poem is like shoplifting.” The short story, he says, has given him “a new lease on life as a writer” and has served as a coping mechanism for the barrage of what we’ve been dealing with. Despite the many challenges of 2020, Di Prisco retains a hopeful vision of the future, and for literature. In an end-of-year message, Di Prisco wrote to the project’s supporters, acknowledging that the pandemic had hit the project and the larger community hard. But, he insisted, “We are not giving up. We have a story to tell, and it’s your story, and our story. Storytellers forge a literate, democratic society, and that’s a truth worth the struggle.” Paul Wilner is a longtime journalist, poet, and critic who lives in Monterey County. He is the former editor of the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle style section and managing editor of the Hollywood Reporter.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 39

JOE_SUM21_fnl.indd 39

5/19/21 9:44 AM

05192021114553

40 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 40

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173956

A WRITER SEARCHES FOR HIS LONG-LOST UNCLE BY ANDREW LEONARD

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 41

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 41

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173957

ON A JANUARY EVENING, SORTING THROUGH FAMILY MEMORABILIA IN MY BASEMENT, I stumbled on a sealed manila envelope, addressed to me in

Berkeley, sent by my grandmother. It was postmarked October 2003. I had no idea why I’d never opened it. Inside, I discovered photocopies of four letters that my Uncle Ken had written to his Uncle Warren while he was a student at UC Berkeley. In the first letter, dated January 28, 1965, Ken begins by expressing thanks for an offer of funds designed to get him through graduation. “... It is just damn good to know there is someone on the other side of the country who is willing to take a chance on an ex-con like me ... But I have an objection to your condition ... I know that when I went into Sproul Hall on December 2, it was with the understanding that I was about to break the law, that, if arrested, I and others would be punished for our act, but that by dramatizing the issue in this undeniably effective manner, we would achieve a very specific goal, whose realization, to me personally, was for various reasons worth the punishment inevitable under the law.” Huh. I rechecked the date of Ken’s letter and did a quick Google search. Just as I suspected—December 2, 1964 was the date of one of the most legendary events in Berkeley’s history: the Free Speech Movement sit-in at which Mario Savio gave his oration about the odious “operation of the machine,” Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome,” and some 1,000 students and university employees occupied Sproul Hall. The sitin ended with the largest mass arrest in California’s history. It also crystallized what the name “Berkeley” would symbolize to the world for decades to come. I was stunned and baffled. My Berkeley roots are deep. I was born in Oakland in 1962 while my parents were students at Cal. I have two master’s degrees from Berkeley; two of my sisters and my ex-wife earned Berkeley Ph.D.s. I’ve lived in the city for the last 33 years, raising two kids from birth to graduation from Berkeley High. I used to joke that I was the physical personification of a “Berkeley anti-war protest” because my own birth was planned to keep my father out of the draft. But I’d never known that my uncle participated in the historic sit-in. And I couldn’t begin to comprehend why my father, a politically engaged writer and passionate storyteller, had never told me about his younger brother’s glorious arrest. My basement is always cold in January, but as I held those letters and thought about Ken for the first time in many years, I felt an additional chill. Ken was a family tragedy. He was, according to my father and grandmother, a “casualty of the ’60s.” He’d dropped way too much acid in Berkeley, gone crazy, and died young. He started out a golden boy, the president of his high school student body, a whiz at math who began his collegiate career at Caltech, but he became a cautionary tale. Don’t do drugs, Andrew, or you’ll end up like your Uncle Ken.

Maybe my father suppressed his memories of the sit-in because his younger brother’s descent into madness was too painful. Or maybe he never told me about the Sproul Hall arrest because the bold political statement complicated what was otherwise a pretty clear-cut drugs-are-bad narrative. Chroniclers of the social ferment of the 1960s in the Bay Area have often tried to draw a line between the political protests and the druggie excess, as if the latter undermined or invalidated the former. But here, in the person of my Uncle Ken, free speech activism and LSD experimentation were indivisible. My father and grandmother aren’t around to answer any questions, but I still wanted to know more. In Ken’s cursive scrawl I sensed insights into my own narrative arc. I have long recognized that I ended up raising a family in Berkeley because I was an easy mark for the double-barreled seduction of the city’s progressive history and its legacy of counterculture experimentation. Despite the family warnings, I grew up with a clear case of ’60s envy. Should I blame Uncle Ken for that, or praise him?

Dear Mother, Well, things are really popping around here. After ten weeks of abstract support of the Free Speech Movement, I decided at last, on Wednesday, to act in accordance with my convictions; as a result I have a police record, and a head full of mixed-emotions on the wisdom of my act, not to mention a rather painful wrist, commemorating the zeal of one arresting officer. Yes, I am one of the 801 students whose martyrdom you have probably been reading about. ... In the fall of 2010, my son and I cleaned out my grandmother’s house in Lakewood, a suburban town nestled between Long Beach and Los Angeles. The most important object we brought back to Berkeley was a large wooden chest filled with her photo albums and collected letters. That chest had been sitting in my dining room, more or less untouched, for a decade. After reading

42 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 42

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173957

;

Ken’s account of his adventures sent to Uncle Warren, it occurred to me that the chest might contain additional clues to his life story. I found a shoebox labeled “Ken’s Letters,” containing 65 letters written to his mother between 1958 and 1967. Forty-three are stamped with Berkeley postmarks. The return address for the last one in the box is the Mendocino State Mental Hospital. Thumbing through the letters, I felt like an intruder. What right did I have to rummage through this archive of motherson intimacy? And yet: I am co-executor of my grandmother’s estate. Neither my father nor my grandmother ever finished much-anticipated memoirs that could have clarified the historical record. A family line packed with writers bequeaths its own special burdens. Maybe it was my filial duty to set the record straight? Reading Ken’s letters was a trip, and not an altogether easy one. Some mornings, I could only read two or three before breaking into tears, or succumbing to a splitting headache. A man who had been a mere stick-figure in my imagination—I can recall meeting him only once—came to life in full Day-Glo color. Ken was funny, passionate about music and politics, and, at least at the beginning, painfully innocent— a child of the halcyon 1950s. As I got to know him, I started to miss him. His enthusiasm, his wit, his self-doubt and constant quest for meaning—he reminded me of someone ... He was 17 when he enrolled at Caltech, but bombed out within a year; apparently, he wasn’t as good at math as everyone thought. By the fall of 1960 he was at Cal. He arrived in town, I realized, around a month before I was conceived, when my parents were still living in Berkeley. In between the usual stuff—pleas for money, updates on his (generally terrible) grades, complaints about his love life and anxiety about the draft—emerge vivid snapshots of cultural history. He reports seeing, along with 90,000 others, President John F. Kennedy speak at 1962’s Charter Day celebration in Memorial Stadium. “He was winning as always,” Ken writes of JFK, before ripping Governor Pat Brown’s

accompanying speech to shreds. He is outraged in November 1964 when California voters overwhelmingly repeal an anti-discrimination housing law: “the people of California got what they wanted, and I have lost all sympathy for them.” In 1966, he informs his Uncle Warren that the Beatles’ new album Revolver “is worth a closer listen than any of the others.” In 1967, he jokes to his mother that “the members of our commune found we got along better when we weren’t living together.” There are four separate references to LSD, a drug he calls, in the fall of 1965, “my newest vice.” But the jewel in the crown of this collection is an 11-page handwritten letter dated December 6, 1964—just four days after the FSM sit-in. It is a blow-byblow account of the protest and his subsequent arrest. I could hardly contain my excitement as I started to read. For a reporter or historian, a document of this sort is pure gold, the very definition of a “primary source.” I’ve read many accounts of the sit-in, but most of them are blunted by the passage of time, or the knowledge of what happened afterward. Ken’s account is fresh and of-the-moment. As regards my fellow conspirators, I will admit to misgivings at first. Looking around me where I sat, I saw so many hair-dos on men which might have been KEN WAS A FAMILY TRAGEDY, the envy of Jesus Christ himself that I felt compelled to go home A “CASUALTY OF THE ’60S.” and shave off my beard, if only HE’D DROPPED TOO MUCH ACID, to prove that a Cal student could believe in the FSM without being GONE CRAZY, AND DIED YOUNG. a hairy malcontent (To your way HE BECAME A CAUTIONARY TALE. of thinking, doubtless, that will be the only good thing to come DON’T DO DRUGS, ANDREW, out of all this. ... I regained my OR YOU’LL END UP former clean shaven image just in time to look wholesome for my LIKE YOUR UNCLE KEN. mug-shots) ... I can honestly say, however, that the vast majority of those with whom I came into contact had a very real understanding of the issues involved, of the possible consequences of their act, and of the very real place in the American political spectrum of the democratic institution of constructive civil disobedience. Contrary to what you may have read in the Times, fully 81% of those arrested were students at U.C. and the bulk of the remainder were university employees in some capacity. I know exactly how the leadership of FSM came to be elected, I know many of them, and I can assure you that despite the amazingly flagrant propaganda perpetuated by most newspapers in the area, the movement is not Communist inspired. (I feel foolish even bothering to deny the charge). For the students, arrests notwithstanding, the protest resulted in total victory. After the majority of Berkeley’s faculty voted in support of the protesters, the administration surrendered and ended its ban. The concession represented a landmark moment for a country with all-too-fresh memories of the McCarthy era. As one participant wrote many years later, the FSM “burned off the fog of Cold War repression.” Berkeley’s example sparked a wave of campus unrest across the country and set the stage for an era of anti-Vietnam War protest. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 43

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 43

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173958

But then things got messy. In the East Bay, a cycle of escalating protest and crackdowns became progressively more violent. Drug use exploded. The protests and surging counterculture incited a backlash that brought conservative politicians to power both in California and nationally—Ronald Reagan ran for governor “to clean up the mess in Berkeley.” In the blink of an eye, the righteous clarity of civil disobedience was muddied by heroin overdoses and psychedelic freak-outs, bomb scares, and helicopters spraying tear gas. Ken’s own journey paralleled the larger arc. The last letter in my grandmother’s box is postmarked December 21, 1967, in the middle of the winter that ended the Summer of Love. Ken reports that he won’t be home for Christmas because he has checked himself into an experimental “group therapy” drug rehab program at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital. In closing, he tells his mother that there’s an acceptance process to go through for long-term admission: “If I’m rejected I have to leave the hospital— I don’t know where I’ll go if I can’t qualify for the loony bin!” And then the trail goes dark. For the next ten years, my grandmother rarely knew Ken’s exact location. I have heard stories of panhandling and more arrests—at least one for public exposure—and random phone calls to family members complaining about persecution from shadowy government agents. Occasionally, Ken would show up at his mother’s door in Lakewood. I have a picture of my step-grandfather giving him a haircut. In 1979, at the age of 36, he died of undiagnosed prostate cancer. I remember only one interaction with Ken. I was 12 or 13, visiting my grandmother during the summer, sometime in the mid-’70s. He smoked a pipe; we played an inconclusive game of chess; he told me that “god” was “dog” spelled backward. Or was it the other way around? I was unimpressed.

(10/6/65) Also, last summer, Jenny and I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with psychedelics, specifically, marajuana [sic] and LSD. Her growing sense of strength and individuality could be in large part attributed to LSD insights... Unfortunately, Jenny’s new sense of purpose could not withstand a long-ingrained sense of insecurity; her parents succeeded in undermining her faith in me (she now tells me) and with her faith in me went her faith in the discoveries she had made with me. So she stayed in Massachusetts. I, in turn, found nothing better to do then renew the experimentation alone. I was looking not for euphoria, but, as I have always been, for meaning. The remarkable thing is, I seem to have found it, after going through the nearest thing to hell on earth I ever expect to encounter. I will tell you all about these things over Thanksgiving, as they will require a great deal of time in the telling.

Ken’s letters paint him as an unabashed evangelist for lysergic consciousness expansion. This is backed up by the memories of his cousin, Susanne, who told me that in the summer of 1965 he tried to get both of his uncles to drop acid. When I was a teenager, my father would often recount a story about going to a party in Berkeley where Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” was blasting at overwhelming volume. At the party, Ken handed him two tabs of LSD. My father did not partake. Instead, he always said with pride, he threw the tabs into the toilet on his plane ride back to the East Coast. It is one thing to have your father tell you your uncle blew his mind out on acid, and quite another to read Ken’s own words describing his bad trips, his kooky idea for “a new art form, literature and music combined,” and his hopes for the social transformation sure to accompany the coming of age of a “new psychedelic generation.” In March 1966, Time agazine published a story warning of an “epidemic of acid heads” in Berkeley and claiming that 10,000 Cal students had taken LSD. I generally dismiss such rhetoric as scaremongering, but I can’t deny the written record of my uncle’s quest for druginduced transcendence. When I discovered a journal article from 1969 that described the drug program he enrolled himself in at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital as specifically created to address the explosion of drug addiction and psychosis that sprouted from the Summer of Love, the case seemed cut and dried: Ken was indeed a casualty of the ’60s. He lost himself. Will you accept the analogy that the United States has grown up a nation of illegitimate children, alienated from the world and themselves, because, although we have acquired a certain mongrel strength from the ‘melting pot’ we suffer from a national identity crisis, because we don’t know who our collective fathers are, and there is no one to absolve our guilt? That may be one reason why we are so afraid of the new psychedelic movement; we don’t wish to look at

44 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 44

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173959

ourselves, because we are afraid of what we will find. We won’t be able to overcome the guilt until we have treated the cause (in the best tradition of Freud), but the new generation (or at least some of them) is doing just that. But I think we have to rise above ourselves in order to treat ourselves (America might do well to ‘lose itself ’). Ken was 23 years old when he wrote that letter. When I was 23 years old, I was arrested in New Mexico for the possession of MDMA and marijuana. I was midway through an epic cross-country road trip. My girlfriend and I were on our way ... to Berkeley.

I GUESS EVEN THOSE WHO DO KNOW HISTORY are doomed

to repeat it. The best I can say for my family’s morality tale is that it may have slowed down what otherwise would have been a headlong rush. Despite my ’60s envy, I did not try psychedelics until after graduating from college. By that time some of my best friends had been singing the praises of magic mushrooms and LSD for years. They did not appear to be going crazy, and some of them were very attractive. So I finally succumbed and spent a summer grooving to the obvious organic interconnectedness of the universe, giggling at the crisscrossing black tracers my Frisbee drew across the sky, and discovering profound insights in the music of The Cure. I even, for a minute, considered becoming a vegetarian. That didn’t stick, but a quasi-religious appreciation for recycling did. I do recall with absolutely clarity, even after 37 years, one horrific trip, my own experience of hell, during which I found myself at fault for all the evils of Western individualism and imperialism. But unlike my uncle, I did not share any of the insights my trips provided with my parents. That seemed like asking for trouble. Looking back, I marvel at the mixed messages that accompanied my upbringing. My parents bought each Beatles album as soon as it came out. So even as I was hearing horror stories about Ken, “Lucy in

the Sky with Diamonds” was in high rotation, and Lennon was telling to me to turn off my mind, relax, and float downstream. My father even took me to see a screening of Yellow Submarine at an impressionable age. Shouldn’t he have known better? So of course I was going to drop acid and get to Berkeley one way or another. I was conceived to keep my father out of the draft and weaned on counterculture romance! I had no desire—or capability—to draw a demarcation line between the political and the psychedelic. Quite the contrary: I felt compelled to synthesize them. Berkeley was my manifest destiny. It took me longer than I expected to get there. The arrest, precipitated by a pot pipe in clear view of an officer who stopped me at a roadblock, proved a serious speed bump. My father, near the nadir of his alcoholism, could barely talk to me. My mother deemed my act so “immoral” that she hung up on my call from jail (although to her credit, her next call was to get me the lawyer who bailed me out). When I asked her, while writing this story, whether my arrest made her think I was following Ken’s path, she laughed. “Oh, absolutely!” I didn’t end up in a mental hospital. My charges were dropped on a technicality, and I split town for Taiwan, where I had previously spent a year studying Chinese and knew I could be gainfully employed as an English teacher. I finally OF COURSE I WAS GOING TO made it to Berkeley in the fall DROP ACID AND GET TO BERKELEY of 1988, enrolled in a joint master’s program in journalism and ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. Asian studies. By the spring I WAS CONCEIVED TO KEEP of 1989, I had scored a sweet deal: a rent-controlled backMY FATHER OUT OF THE DRAFT yard cottage in North Berkeley, AND WEANED ON just a block or two from where Jack Kerouac used to hang out COUNTERCULTURE ROMANCE! reading the Diamond Sutra in another backyard cottage rented by Allen Ginsberg. When I picked up the keys to my cottage, the previous resident, a Deadhead who was my older sister’s best friend, heaved a great sigh and said, “Berkeley isn’t what it used to be.” That felt a little rude, but, new in town, who was I to disagree?

(2/19/62) I can and have sat down at a desk and opened the proper books; but I cannot force my mind to consider and commit to memory what is written there, because there are always things, notably music and personal philosophizing, which I would rather do. I realize that everyone is subject to aimless daydreaming; all minds wander once in awhile; but mine is never at anchor. (10/19/67) I conceive myself—and try to conceive others—as flux. Today I am such, tomorrow I may be something else; it behooves me to remember my potential. Otherwise I may get into the habit of thinking of my self according to a rigid pattern.... Whatever I may be today, I know that I will be someone entirely different tomorrow. This, rather than stability, is the basis of what security I have. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 45

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 45

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021173959

The first quote above is from a long, distraught, and puzzling letter that my uncle wrote when he was 19 years old. He describes himself as estranged from his math major. He is now obsessed with learning to be a composer. This is problematic, as he is the first to acknowledge, because he plays no musical instruments. Nonetheless, he forges ahead, convinces his dean to allow him to enroll in a slate of music classes, and precipitates an academic disaster. His inability to sight-read music results in failure on most of his exams and consequent dismissal from Berkeley. He spends the next 18 months back in Southern California bringing his grades up at local colleges before returning to Cal in the fall of 1964. After his return, he is an English major, and there are no more references to his dream of composing. I have read this letter over and over because it is written several years before there is any evidence that Ken was using psychedelics, but its tone seems off, in striking contrast to lighthearted letters he had written just a few weeks prior. The fixation on composing, the unanchored mind ... it all sounds, well, I don’t know, a bit crazy? Time and again I pull myself back from some distant reverie, and concentrate on the page before me once more, only to slip away into the same meditations a half minute later. This sort of thing continues for hours, sometimes, indeed, for as long as I choose to batter my brain over one particular book. Is there any wonder that I grow weary of it, and seek to escape such drudgery as I did last semester, in card games and pool. I have tried— honestly tried—to force my mind to face and comprehend the studies, but every moment is sheer mental torture, when I think that I might easily be engaged in studying solely for that profession which fires my imagination—not solely, perhaps, but principally, for I want to build my world around music, I want to be able to live and breath it, without feeling guilty for having used up precious moments, stolen away from valuable, but intensely hated study time.

whether psychedelic drugs are useful in treating depression or alcoholism. So maybe acid wasn’t the primary villain in my uncle’s drama. Maybe he was just a smart young man who happened to be at genetic risk for schizophrenia. Maybe the disastrously bad grades that he was beating himself up for were connected to his mental illness. Maybe the “hell on earth” that he reports about one of his acid trips was the result of a catastrophic intersection between genetic predisposition for lunacy and a powerful mind-altering drug. It is a very sad story. It is also, I feel, an absolution.

IN THE SPRING OF 2021 , I

I suppose this letter could be read as an ultra-articulate description of attention deficit disorder. But there may be another, more unsettling explanation. After I’d digested all of my uncle’s letters I called up my cousin Susanne, a now-retired college provost who was born a year after Ken. I was chasing rumors I vaguely remembered about incidences of mental illness on my grandmother’s side of the family. Susanne told me that her older brother had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic at age 18. The very next day, I read the following sentence in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book on the “new science of psychedelics,” How to Change Your Mind. “Especially in the case of young people at risk for schizophrenia, an LSD trip can trigger their first psychotic episode, and sometimes did.” Pollan later told me in an email that patients with a family risk of schizophrenia are excluded from the new wave of medical trials seeking to determine

started making hikes from my home in South Berkeley to all the different addresses on Ken’s letters, and other points of related historical interest. His first stopping point, 2026 Delaware in North Berkeley, was just three blocks due south of my backyard cottage— and five blocks from the famous “Green Factory” on Virginia where Cal dropout Augustus Owsley Stanley III manufactured so much of the LSD that made Berkeley ground zero for the counterculture. 2226 Dwight Way. 2314 Ellsworth. The Free Speech Cafe at Moffitt Library. The Savio Steps at Sproul Plaza. 2420 Ridge Road, just around the corner from North Gate Hall, where I went to journalism school. 2903 Telegraph Avenue: the address of the Institute of Social and Personal Relations, where Ken did computer programming work for an outfit he described as “a non-profit group concerning itself with counseling and therapy, sociological research, and, in general, ‘self-realization.’” 2903 Telegraph is just a mile east of where I have lived for the last 25 years. I have biked or walked past it at least a couple of hundred times on my way up to climb the Berkeley Hills, never once imagining that my long-lost Uncle Ken used to frequent the premises. The institute’s offices were on the second floor of a building occupied at ground level by The Jabberwock, a folk music club and café famous

46 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 46

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021174000

for launching the career of Country Joe & This change did not start with the Free Speech Movement. Civil rights The Fish. The building was torn down in activists had been raising a ruckus all over the Bay Area throughout the early 1969. All that remains now is a parking lot ’60s, and as early as 1957 UC Berkeley students founded the campus politifor a nephrology center. cal party SLATE in an effort to contest the power of the existing fraternityFrom self-realization to kidney disdominated conservative establishment. But on December 2, 1964, Berkeley’s ease—I didn’t set out on my journey into nascent radicalism went national. There would be no going back. Berkeley Ken’s past to find a metaphor capturing became Berkeley. what happened to the generation that When I was choosing between graduate schools, the myths and legends survived coming of age in Berkeley in the that attach to that name enticed me on multiple levels. But when the time 1960s, but some truths are inescapable. came to raise a family, I must confess to having some concerns. Was it really Berkeley in 2021 is definitely not the same a good idea to do so in a place where access to such a wide variety of “recreas it was in 1964, or 1967, or, for that matational” intoxicants was so readily available? Call me hypocritical, but the last ter, 1988. thing I wanted was for my kids to get a head start on Ken’s trajectory. If they But in my traipsing around Berkeley, were anything like me, or him, they would be vulnerable. marveling at the magnolia flowers that That concern now seems ludicrous. The upside of exposure to Berkeannounce the arrival of the ley values far outweighed the spring, peering into the Little dangers. I am beyond thankFree Libraries that dot every ful to the politically engaged other block, chasing the ghost writers and historians and of the uncle I never knew, the teachers who cluster here; passage of time collapsed, and the lesbian preschool caregivBerkeley, old and new, came ers and the organic farmers together. Sixty years apart, I and the extreme recyclers; the discovered that my path had bearers of the civil rights torch crossed Ken’s innumerable constantly urging us to do betCHASING THE GHOST times. He was a computer man ter on constantly advancing who dabbled in Zen Buddhism fronts. Some may trace their OF THE UNCLE I NEVER KNEW, and dropped acid; I was a jourintellectual heritage back to THE PASSAGE OF TIME COLLAPSED, nalist who wrote about comthe Free Speech Movement AND BERKELEY, OLD AND NEW, puters, dabbled in Daoism, and radical political organizand dropped acid. With each ers of the 1960s; some may CAME TOGETHER. SIXTY YEARS APART, step I took, each letter I read, have been inspired by an aweI DISCOVERED THAT MY PATH HAD his world came closer to mine, some mushroom trip to start and the more I became cona sustainable organic farm in CROSSED KEN’S INNUMERABLE TIMES. vinced that his Berkeley was Sonoma; all of them together my Berkeley. That, in fact, Ken helped rear a daughter who was responsible for creating protests against travel bans my Berkeley. and police brutality at the drop A funny fact I discovered of a hat and a son secure in his while researching this story: gender-queer identity. According to historian WilI wish Ken’s restlessness— liam Rorabaugh’s Berkeley at his mind, never at anchor— War, between 1924 and 1959 hadn’t come to such a disastrous Berkeley ’s voters rejected end. I wish my kids could have every single bond measure grown up with their uncle joinaimed at funding schools ing in feasts at the Thanksgivexcept one. This made me ing dinner table, trading barbs chuckle because since I arrived in 1988, and banter with his older brother. His absence is a sorrow. Berkeley’s voters have passed every single But the wonder of the journey that started when I opened the envelope school bond measure on the ballot, and from my grandmother, 18 years after she sent it, is that Ken is now a real perendorsed plenty of other tax hikes besides. son instead of a sad caricature. Who knew? He turned out to be one of the pioIt’s kind of a shock when we don’t raise our neers who helped build the psychic infrastructure of my town. That makes the own taxes. uncle I never knew an integral part of the community that raised my children. The change in voting patterns was I know my gratitude for this cannot assuage my father and grandmother’s the result, argues Rorabaugh, of a wholegrief. But I feel a lightness of spirit, as if somewhere, a ghost has finally found sale demographic transition that swept his long-sought peace. through Berkeley over the course of the ’60s. Conservative voters—fleeing the Andrew Leonard, M.A., M.J. ’91, has been writing about technology and culture newly desegregated schools, the rampant for 25 years. His current passion project is a newsletter about Sichuan food and drug use, the constant protests—moved globalization (http://andrewleonard.substack.com). out. Liberal voters moved in. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 47

Leonard_SUM21_fnlmt2.indd 47

5/19/21 3:36 PM

05192021174000

Lifelong Learning Through Travel Explore educational travel opportunities in 2021 and 2022 by visiting alumni.berkeley.edu/travel.

Book with confidence!

Many of our tour operators have relaxed their cancellation policies. For detailed information, please check out specific tour brochures. caldiscoveries@alumni.berkeley.edu | 510.900.8222 @caldiscoveriestravel @caldiscoveries

FP ADS_SUM21_crx.indd 48

5/14/21 4:17 PM

We the People Elaine Kim on a reckoning with race many years in the making By Laura Smith

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS HANSCHEN

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 49

Kim_SUM21_fnl2.indd 49

5/19/21 11:20 AM

05192021132407

IMAGE FROM ZINE “ASIANS UNITE!” CA. 1970, THIRD WORLD STRIKE AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY COLLECTION, 1968-1972, CES ARC 2015/1.EREPERITA; KIM: COURTESY OF DEPT. OF ETHNIC STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

Before Elaine Kim came to Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in 1968, she was used to being the only Asian person in the room. Kim, who is Korean American, was born in New York and raised in a predominantly working class white suburb of Washington, D.C., the daughter of a migrant farmworker mother and waiter-turned-diplomat father.

Creative force: Elaine Kim was the first Asian woman to get tenure at Berkeley. Pacific Islanders (AAPI) more generally. What were we missing when you started your career?

In the early days, one person would be designated as the spokesperson for the entire group. So for example, after Amy Tan published Joy Luck Club, the news media asked her about Tiananmen, and then when Chang-Rae Lee wrote Native Speaker, they asked him about Korean unification because they didn’t know who to ask. So it’s a real problem for communities to have one voice represent the whole to begin with. It’s much better now.

The discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

I just asked you to speak for a very large group. I imagine that’s frustrating.

Much of your career has been devoted to correcting representations of the Korean community and Asian American/

I appreciate that, but I don’t feel like I’m speaking for anybody but myself right now. Have you read that

MARCUS HANSCHEN

She would go on to be the University’s first Asian woman to get tenure and a founding member of both the Ethnic Studies Department and the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program. At Berkeley, while she wasn’t alone, she didn’t feel she belonged. Non-white students didn’t see themselves reflected in the curriculum or the faculty. In 1969, Kim joined the Third World Liberation Front protests demanding that the university acknowledge the contributions of communities of color to history and scholarship. “Our motto was, ‘if something you want does not exist, you can try to create it,’” she says. The result was the founding of the Ethnic Studies Department. It was not all roses from there. When she became a lecturer in 1971, teaching a remedial English course, she told her supervisor that policies about who would be required to take the class—which students were required to pay for but which earned them zero credits—were racist and unfair. She was fired from the program. The director’s husband told her she had “a history of deviousness.” The questions of who is represented and how define Kim’s career. In the years that followed her academic career, she wrote books and produced films documenting the Asian American experience, whether it be in Hollywood or the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Once again, as we encounter more examples of widespread Asian hate in America and find ourselves in a place to reimagine our country’s relationship to race, California magazine spoke to Elaine Kim about what we can learn from those early fights and where we might be headed.

50 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Kim_SUM21_fnl2.indd 50

5/19/21 11:20 AM

05192021132408

The Gate

Forging identity: Kim at the start of her career (right). A Third World strike zine drawing (left).

book Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka? What’s really great about that book is she uses both the first person plural and the first person singular. She writes, “We all arrived as picture brides.” She represents both their individual experiences and the collective experiences they shared with thousands of other picture brides as they disembarked from their ship to see their

picture husbands for the first time. Some were really happy about it. And some were not. “I got raped on my wedding night,” “My husband was really nice to me,” “My husband was a no-show, I picked somebody else”—all these different realities under one umbrella. And I thought she was really making a comment on how you can’t have “the group is the group.”

Along those lines, what do you think about the term AAPI, as a catch-all for a really diverse group of people? Is it too big?

Politically, it has to be that way, because you can’t get anything done for Hmong people, unless they’re in a group of Southeast Asians. In that unity and with those numbers, we’re able to have more political clout. But now [people acknowledge

A piece of Telegraph in your inbox

The monthly newsletter from California magazine highlights our most thought-provoking articles on cutting-edge research, culture shifts on campus, and the people in the Cal community who are making waves. Stay in the loop by subscribing at alumni.berkeley.edu/subscribe.

MARCUS HANSCHEN

Scan me to subscribe!

Published by the Cal Alumni Association

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 51

Kim_SUM21_fnl2.indd 51

5/19/21 11:20 AM

05192021132409

“I think the moment is here, again. I think that we can do it, and maybe do it better.”

white community and got to UCLA or Berkeley, they felt the same way. In the old days, I’d have a class that had 200 students in it, all Asian Americans, and they might have looked like they were all cut from the same cloth, but they were all different, of course. Some of them felt strange being in a whole room full of other Asian Americans. Is this what got you interested in questions of representation?

the differences] saying, “We have a really diverse community. I’m just one person speaking.”

definitely made to feel like I was temporarily here. I didn’t really know that many Asian Americans until I got to Berkeley.

Did you grow up feeling represented in your community?

How did that feel to suddenly be surrounded by people who looked like you?

I grew up in the D.C. area, and schools were desegregated when I was in junior high school. My brother and I were the only Asians, I think. And then there was one Puerto Rican kid and then maybe 12 Black kids. It was very Jewish and Anglo working class. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. I was used to being the only Asian American. They always thought I was foreign and about to return to my home country. And they said that I spoke English really well. So I was

I looked at Asian Americans the way I think white people probably looked at Asian Americans because I was used to being the only Asian American. When I got to California, I saw all these very American [Asians]. There were many kinds of Asian Americans, including very cool ones, including really fashionable ones and ones who dressed like gangsters. I was so shocked. I felt really self-conscious to approach them. Other students have told me that, when they grew up in a totally

One of the big things back in the day, was stereotyping in Hollywood. I would say very early on, everybody was interested in representation and felt the importance of films and television in our fate. And so all the students could relate to the fact that, for men, there was only Charlie Chan. Bruce Lee wasn’t even a possibility because they wouldn’t let him play in the roles. And then for women, it was just as bad— Madame Butterfly and Dragon Lady. And then there were all the faceless hordes that obey the communist dictator. And how did you start getting into activism and community organizing?

One of the premises of [the Third World] strike was that instead of bringing education to your ghetto, or your reservation, or your Chinatown, we were encouraged to get away from those communities and live a successful life away from them. And we did not want to be educated away from our communities; we wanted to work for and in them. Many of the really important nonprofit organizations that exist today exist because of that group of people: the Asian Law Caucus, Asian Health Services, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation. We had the advantage of mainstream society being so shocked that they didn’t know what to do about our protests—and so we did get money to start these organizations. It’s like Martin Luther King: People think that we all graciously named all our schools and streets after him, but they forget that he was actually stabbed with scissors and spit on. They might think that all these things were granted. But actually, they were struggled for. In response to the very disruptive student strike, the administration agreed to fund the ethnic studies programs. We’re in a similar stage right now, where buildings are having their names removed, but it’s contentious. And it’s hard. Generations from now, people may think that it was very smooth, that it was never uncomfortable for anyone.

52 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Kim_SUM21_fnl2.indd 52

5/19/21 11:20 AM

05192021132410

The Gate

Or even that the university administration said, “Oh, let’s rename the buildings!” Right. So you were one of the founders of the Ethnic Studies Department, and you’ve talked about the resistance you faced in implementing a curriculum that wasn’t just about white male scholarship. You also experienced structural and more explicit racism. I don’t know if I would have stuck around to see how things turned out, if I were you.

We were very segregated; nobody wanted joint classes with us, or joint appointments or anything. We were not asked to participate in policy planning or decision making in the university. They still thought that image from 1968 prevailed in 1990. It’s kind of amazing. But we were together. I thought the University was hostile, but Ethnic Studies wasn’t hostile. We had each other. Because of that, it wasn’t really that bad. Going forward, will this reckoning we’re experiencing now—both in terms of awareness of anti-Asian sentiment, but also on race more generally speaking—will this stick?

I really felt with Black Lives Matter that it might be different this time. Five years ago, I used to hear comments from white women at my gym like “I don’t understand why they don’t just do what the police say?” or “Look, they’re killing people in East Oakland. I’m so glad the bad guys are killing each other and not us.” I never said anything, but I always thought, “Oh, it’s really good that I came here so I could hear these conversations.” I really do think that there are people who might not have really believed that if you’re Black and breathing, or Black and sleeping, you might get killed for that. Or just if you’re in the car, you’ve got to stick both hands out, and you’ve got to do everything you can to avoid being killed. And I think they believe it now. They believe it and they don’t like it. There have always been lots of white students who supported ethnic studies. All along there have been allies, of course, in the faculty and also with the students. Now people are volunteering to escort elderly Asian ladies down the street. I keep seeing now that there’s more credit given to Black talent than there ever was before. That’s amazing. So I think the moment is here, again. I think that we can do it, and maybe do it better. There’s more understanding of what’s possible and what to ask for than there used to be. I think people your age are going to do it.

It’s time to make a change. The Cal Alumni Association is bringing together alumni and campus leaders to help our community reflect and heal in a new series, Alumni Making a Difference. Alumni and members of the Cal community explore how we can use gratitude, faith, community, and service to move forward. Speakers include an NFL executive, UC Berkeley leaders, and a broadcast journalist. To learn more, visit alumni.berkeley.edu/makeadifference.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 53

Kim_SUM21_fnl2.indd 53

5/19/21 11:20 AM

05192021132412

SEE THE POSSIBILITIES eyecare.berkeley.edu

Adventures Await Your eyes are the gateway to a beautiful world. Keep them healthy with regular eye exams.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

FP ADS_SUM21_crx.indd 54

5/14/21 4:17 PM

Student View

The Seasons Still Change By Annabelle Long ’22

Welcome to “Student View,” a new column featuring the thoughts, opinions, and musings of undergraduate writers at Cal. This spring, for our inaugural “Student View” essay contest, California asked current Cal students to answer the question: How has the pandemic changed you? Below is the winning essay. For entry rules go to alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/ student-view-column-contest.

ISTOCK PHOTO

Berkeley bloomed all at once. Last week everything was green, Technicolor and soggy from the winter rain that seeps into spring, and this week, everything is different. Brighter, more colorful. I didn’t know the name of wisteria until yesterday—I only knew its weepy hang, its purple gradient. Today, I can’t remember what my street looked like without wisteria. The purple blossoms make me forget that other colors exist. And other times. It feels like my first spring here, and in some ways, it is. As a freshman, I never ventured south of Dwight Way, into the south side of Berkeley where I now live. And as a sophomore, I spent spring at home, indoors, in Sacramento, observing the blossoming of my neighborhood from a quiet, careful distance. Spring is my favorite season, and Berkeley is my favorite city, and it didn’t occur to me until yesterday that I’d never really known them together. I thought I had realized all the losses of the pandemic. But I didn’t even know wisteria’s name. Or that wisteria can be white, and hang like soft, sweet, ivory icicles—a floral mimicry of a winter that Berkeley will never know; a reminder of things I never knew to miss. Am I allowed to miss something I never knew? I do. The pandemic often inspires abstract feelings of loss. I’ve been lucky, as far as things go. Compared to the tragedies experienced by many, my losses were not unusual or particularly devastating: a year of in-person classes, afternoons in the library, my senses of smell and taste for a handful of days. These were processed to fit within a pandemic-limited existence. How am I supposed to account for losses I don’t even realize I’ve lost? Is that even worth attempting? My friends and I talk about this often— what does it mean to mourn a year we only knew in anticipation? The pandemic, to us, began as a moment. Saying something occurred “in quarantine” connoted a particular time and feeling; it recalled the angst and expectancy and misplaced optimism of the first months of the pandemic. But we have been “in quarantine” for a year now, and it no longer feels accurate or reasonable to describe a period that will see me go from 19 to 21 as just a moment. “In quarantine” has become life, no longer a time that feels like an aberration, but rather a continuous state. For now. When the pandemic started, I thought it would feel like a season. I never

considered that I would experience a second pandemic spring. Berkeley is still blooming, and I will soon see it turn to summer for the first time. I’ve known a pandemic summer, but I’ve never known Berkeley in June. I don’t know what happens when the wisteria stops blooming. It’s funny how I’ve lived through a year of events I never thought possible but can’t wrap my head around where the little purple flowers will go when they slip off their vines. It feels as though the pandemic should have expanded my imagination, should have given me tools to imagine a world of unexpected and surprising events, but I find myself limited to what I can see. I can still see the wisteria, and I am still staying inside. I don’t think I can see a future beyond that yet. But the seasons will change, and the wisteria will go somewhere, and the pandemic will end, so I suppose I just need to keep looking. Originally from Sacramento, Annabelle Long is a rising senior at the University, where she studies history and creative writing and works in the Student Advocate’s Office as a caseworker.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 55

Contest_SUM21_fnl.indd 55

5/20/21 10:00 AM

05202021120252

My favorite definition of good leadership comes from the World Economic Forum: “True leadership is exemplified by those who are able to energize individuals and teams; empower, fertilize and build communities; and recognize and form the talent around them. They are the coaches, learners, teachers and mentors who demonstrate the discipline it takes to make changes to other people’s lives and to our world.”

Note the emphasis on others, the extent Outdoor to which this definition judges leaders by session: Berkeley their ability to bring out the best in those faculty have they lead, rather than the power they wield. adapted to pandemic Berkeley represents the very antithesis of the by finding a command-and-control organization. Our new ways staff and faculty are profoundly connected to convey learning. to, and invested in, our mission. They feel a sense of ownership and take great pride in what we do and what we stand for. They want and deserve to be heard and engaged. Over the course of this challenging year, I have seen, time and again, this orientation towards the team prove its worth and relevance. Once we, together, established the values and objectives for our response to the pandemic, the inherent resilience of Berkeley’s professional community emerged not because of a directive from the center. Rather, it arose from every

corner of campus, from teams and individuals who embraced and were accustomed to devolved responsibility. Our staff took the initiative and found innovative and adaptive ways to sustain the excellence and scope of our academic programs, as well as the services we offer to support student academic success and well-being. Our faculty developed pedagogical muscles they never knew they had, finding new ways to convey knowledge and love of learning. Leadership was everywhere, diffused throughout the institution and applied in ways that no highly centralized system ever could. That resilience, perseverance, and sense of purpose in the face of extraordinary challenges is why, in many ways, our university is emerging from this year stronger than ever. I also learned—again—that humility is an essential attribute for every leader. Assuming leadership is like stepping into a river. The river has flowed to the point that we enter it, and it will continue to flow after we step out. An important part of being a leader is understanding the course the river has taken, the broad sweep of its history, and the powerful context of its values. We must take into account the mores and memories, ideals and aspirations that took root long before we ever arrived on the scene and will persist long after we leave. This is particularly true for Berkeley. If we have emerged stronger from this year it is because we understand the source of our collective resilience. Our university is both a public service and a public good. We not only profoundly change the lives of the students we educate, we also touch and improve the lives of people around the world. In fact, the institution itself occupies a unique leadership role in society. Our university was established as a means to promote democracy, advance the greater good, and spread the blessings of an excellent education beyond the offspring of the elite. Today, we celebrate our identity as an engine of socioeconomic mobility, as an institution animated by a determination to make the world a better place. We are living in a historic moment when things are shifting about us in ways that will have a profound impact upon the future. What animates us as a university is individual and institutional agency—the notion that through the discovery, dissemination, and discussion of knowledge we can make the world a better place. This may be a perilous time, but so, too, is it a time of creative ferment and possibility, and that is prime time for this public university. As a leader, I have the privilege—and the responsibility—of supporting and directing that agency so that it advances our mission, adheres to our values, and supports the people we serve. There is no place I would rather be, and there is nothing more meaningful that I could ever do. —Chancellor Carol T. Christ

HULDA NELSON

As life begins its return to something resembling normal, I want to share some of what I have learned about leadership during these unprecedented times, for it speaks directly to what makes our university a special place.

56 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Christ_SUM21_fnl_crx2.indd 56

5/21/21 11:00 AM

05212021130725

Class Notes

We have weathered injections of Moderna or Pfizer and continued with masking for an eventual reintroduction to congenial living. Your Secretary has been waiting patiently to hear words of encouragement on a November reunion. As much as I had hoped to cement plans by March 2021, there is still no confirmation of a campus reunion at the stadium concurrent with Pappy’s Boys in November. All is still on hold. Bob Sockolov of San Francisco has been in touch, as have others, with inquiries. Jim Marinos from San Diego has two dates in November for Pappy’s Boys with neither event confirmed. The moment I hear from the Stadium Club, plans will be disclosed or cancelled. Please keep the faith and your good health. Class Secretary: Elayne McCrea, 23500 Cristo Rey Drive 503H, Cupertino, CA 95014, elayne.mccrea@yahoo.com

Paul Petruzzelli wrote of developments in his life since our college years: Three days after graduating he was on his way to a bicycle tour of Europe. Then OCS in the fall, duty on a destroyer, and a year with the Naval Advisory Group in Korea. He and his wife, Alice, an RN, have a family of four and now great-grandchildren. Paul has been retired for 30 years, and he and his wife have traveled extensively. A highlight was a 52-day Grand Cruise to the Mediterranean and Africa to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Paul is a “proud alumnus” and two of his granddaughters have attended Cal. Lloyd Grable, a native San Franciscan, is now living on the east coast. His employment with the Navy Department has taken him to New Orleans, Jacksonville, and Virginia, with travel to “Gitmo, Subic, Nam, Rota, Saudi, and others.” He and his wife, Bredis, have retired in Florida, are blessed with eight great-grandchildren, and hope to see the Bears beat the Gators. A recent note from the Cal Athletic Director held out hope for a return to campus and actual, not virtual, resumption of campus activity. It is a hope we all share, and in the meantime, stay well, be safe, and Hail to California! Class Secretary: Elaine (Hartgogian) Anderson, 1326 Devonshire Drive, El Cerrito 94530, 510/ 232-3419

Gary and Coralee George Mueller have lived at The Forum at Rancho San Antonio in Cupertino for the past 15 years. The pandemic has afforded them time for lots of reading, walking, listening to music, and doing Zoom and Facetime calls. Now fully vaccinated, Coralee and her husband look forward to light at the end of the tunnel. Chip Wray lives in rural Sonoma. His family includes four children, all in their 60s, ten grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Chip looks forward to increased mobility after a hip replacement this summer. Bob Tanem continues live broadcasting of his weekly

radio show, Bob Tanem in the Garden, Sundays at 9 a.m. on KSFO. Patti Paine Whisler, a resident of Seattle, WA since 1963, was program manager for the City of Seattle, working with neighborhoods to strengthen their relationship and impact with city government. She retired in 1992. Patti served for a decade on the Council of Historic Seattle. It’s hard to believe that in just two short years our class will celebrate its 70th year since graduating from Berkeley. Meanwhile the class secretaries encourage classmates to “Stay in Touch” by emailing news to either Ollie or Beth. Class Secretaries: Beth Mott, 14 Mariposa Drive, San Luis Obispo 93401, bethmott@ charter.net; Oliver White, 292 Hacienda Carmel, Carmel 93923, ollie@razzolink.com

Are you “up” for a 68th Class Reunion? Bob Merrick suggested we explore duplicating what the class of 1950 did: Rent the fabulous University Club, the venue atop the west rim of Memorial Stadium, for our reunion in 2022! Cal ’50 reported attracting 125 classmates and their guests! Can we top that? Please note, you’d be welcome to invite your kids, other relatives and possibly friends as your guests. We need an estimated headcount from you now! Please send an email to Beryl Voss at her address below, and tell us how many of your group might attend if tickets were $60, or less, per person. If the total response is sufficient we will plan an informal catered luncheon on a Friday or Saturday in the fall of 2022. (And in case you’re wondering there is an elevator!) Please let us hear from you ASAP, and we will let you know in the next edition of California magazine if our 68th is a go or no-go! A great story from Jack Ken after reading the article about the renaming of Wurster Hall to Bauer Wurster Hall in the spring issue of this magazine: Jack recalls that during his final year of architecture at Cal, he was assigned a studio space on the third floor of the Naval Architecture Building. The office of Bill Wurster’s wife, Catherine Bauer Wurster (she was a professor of urban planning), was on the stair landing between the first and second floors. The sign on her door read “Catherine Bauer” in large letters followed by “Wurster” in very small letters. She was ahead of her time. HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Bill Morrish who turns 90 this month! Born on June 6, 1931, Bill might be our oldest classmate. If you think you can beat Bill’s record, email your date of birth to your class secretary. All ’54 classmates are encouraged to email news items for mention in this column. Class Secretary: Beryl Smith Voss, 1330 Jones St., Apt. 604, San Francisco 94109, berylvoss@ gmail.com, 415/673-2074

The Class of 1956 Conservator Martha Little is working to help revitalize and preserve a variety of library treasures, including a letter Alexander Hamilton had written to a Philadelphia attorney in 1791. Among the tears she mended was one that went through the middle of Hamilton’s signature. Another highlight included working on a bible Mark Twain had inscribed and given to his mother in 1867. Martha’s repairs made it possible for it to be loaned to the New York Historical Society for an exhibit. Classmates Peter Van Houten, Wes McDaniel, and John Mason have generously pledged the cost of three adjustable tables and adjustable stools, at $1,233 each, to aid her work. Our class has a goal of $32,000 to help the preservation department fulfill these unmet needs. With your donation, the goal will be accomplished before our 65th reunion during Homecoming in October. Please send your donation to UC Berkeley, Donor and Gift Services, 1995 University Ave., Suite 400, Berkeley, CA 94704-1070. Class Secretary: Barbara Jopp Chinn, 5405 Carlton St. #404, Oakland, CA 94618, chinnacres@sbcglobal.net

Albert Chandler and his wife Sue bought a round trip ticket from Bangkok, Thailand to Reno on January 4, 2020, planning on returning to Thailand for an Association of International Petroleum Negotiators meeting in May of 2020. That was pre-pandemic. Today, they are still happily living in their South Lake Tahoe home. Al, who describes 2020 as a time for “rewiring,” had just retired from 50 years of law practice in Thailand. His expertise has been in energy and natural resources law. He has been an adviser on petroleum legislation and mining legislation for Nepal, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. He taught “International Contracts” as a member of the law faculty at Chulalongkorn University. What does he miss most about Thailand? “My daughters!” Three of his five daughters still live in Thailand (and two live in the U.S.). With two vaccine shots behind them, Al and Sue plan for a fair amount of U. S. travel in their new camper van, and, of course, many return visits to Thailand. Richard (Dick) Capp reports that after a 54-year Air Force and Commercial piloting career, he retired from Boeing in 2011 as a test pilot and instructor. Now he does Cal Alumni interviews for the Leadership Scholarship awards and enjoys films through his connection with UCLA’s Film School where he got his MFA in 1976. He takes lots of Zoom calls these days with various groups. Dick has enjoyed several motorcycle tours throughout the Southwest and Pacific Coast, the Lewis & Clark trail, and CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 CAL1

ClassNotes_SUM21_fnl.indd 1

5/19/21 10:24 AM

05192021122545

the latest on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. Still living in Redondo Beach (47 years), he is ready for some heavy traveling again. COVID19 stopped a Botswana photo safari last year. He has rescheduled for October 21, 2021. Patricia Fortini Brown, Ph.D. ’83 recently published her fifth book, The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and its Empire (Oxford University Press, 2021). Originally a member of the class of 1958, she took time off for the birth of her first child and graduated a year late. After pursuing a career as a studio artist and raising two sons, she returned to Berkeley for her Ph.D. in the history of art in 1976 and taught at Princeton in the Department of Art & Archaeology for 27 years (1983-2010). The recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rome Prize, Brown was Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge and the recipient of the British Academy Serena Medal in Italian Studies. In 2021, she was presented with the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America for “a lifetime of uncompromising devotion to the highest standard of scholarship accompanied by exceptional achievement in Renaissance studies.” Class Secretary: Ann Bradshaw Jenkins, 190 Walnut Avenue, Number 102, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, anndobie62@gmail.com

A Zoom meeting of the Class Council was held in March to discuss our 60th reunion. Because the planning would be so difficult this year, it was decided to have the class of ’61 celebrate our 61st anniversary instead. A small get-together will be arranged this year for the weekend of Big Game, but the main events will be held in fall 2022. For details watch our class website at: kaneprod.com/Classof61. Our class supports several projects and one is the scholarships under the Class of 1961 Leadership Award. The students who have been named this year’s recipients are Naomi Garcia, Sophie Zhai, and Ines Huret. Bruce Kane has set up a link on the website to facilitate donations. We have learned of the passing of two of our classmates, Paul “Mike” Little and our head cheerleader, Robert “Bob” LaLiberte. Many of us will never forget Bob leading the California spell-out in his moth-holed sweater at our 50th reunion. It seems that Frank Jones has not only had to endure the isolation of the pandemic, but was also a victim of the wildfires last September, having only a ten-minute notice to vacate his Talent, OR home. He is still working through the problems of rebuilding in a neighborhood that was completely destroyed. Class Secretary: Sandra Mitchell, 4816 SE 36th Ave., Portland, OR 97202, sandramitchellphd@gmail.com, 503-408-0092

Annette Smith was inducted into the California Social Work Hall of

Distinction. She writes: Having received my MSW at Berkeley in 1964, as Annette R. Glick-

man, I enjoyed a long social work career in mental health and chemical dependency. In 1994, I was honored as social worker of the year by the San Diego chapter of the California Society for Clinical Social Work. In 1999, I retired from the faculty at SDSU and in 2003 as a project director from the SDSU Foundation. In 2003, I also received a Lifetime Achievement award given jointly by the Clinical Society and the local chapter of the National Assn. of Social Workers. In 2004, I moved to Naples, FL. In 2007, I published a book based on my doctoral thesis about Alcoholics Anonymous, and in 2017, I was inducted into the NASW Foundation Pioneer Program. Class Secretaries: Julia Engler, PO Box 336, Idleyld Park, OR 97447, jjengler@yahoo.com Jon Shawl, 4555 E. Mayo Blvd. #53101, Phoenix, AZ 85050, jon.c.shawl@gmail.com

and participated in recreation department activities for older, active adults. Dick also finished his 16th year of coaching the Piedmont High JV football team this past spring in a COVID-shortened season. He would like to hear from classmates about their activities, so that he doesn’t have to share his not-veryexciting news again for a while. Class Secretary: Richard Carter, 99 Florada Ave., Piedmont 94610, camktgrp@comcast.net

I’m sure, amidst this pandemic, you’ve found yourself wanting to get lost in a good book. If that sounds like something you are craving, look no further than All Things That Deserve to Perish by Dana Mack (October 25, 2020, Dana Mack Publishing), a tale that penetrates the constrained condition of women in Wilhelmine Germany, as well as the particular social challenges faced by German Jews, who suffered invidious discrimination long before Hitler’s seizure of power. It is also a compassionate rumination on the distractions of sexual love, and the unbearable strains of a life devoted to art. Class Secretary: Lynn Nakada, 58 Mozden Lane, Pleasant Hill, CA 94523, lynn_nakada@ berkeley.edu

Patricia Manning writes: Social distancing—yes, face masks—of course, going crazy—definitely!!!! Miss most—hugs from our seven grandchildren. Rick Reeder writes: On the way back home to Oakland after two weeks away, skiing at Sugar Bowl, Royal Gorge, Sun Valley, and Galena, ID. New knees now scheduled. Here’s to future hugs and new knees! Go Bears! Class Secretary: Diana Powers, 100 Marin Center Drive, #14. San Rafael 94903, dianapowe@aol.com

Tim Nader, J.D. ’82 was recently elected as a Judge of the San Diego County Superior Court. Class Secretary: Maria Protti, 3 Los Amigos, Orinda, CA 94563, maria.protti@cal.berkeley.edu

Classmate Bobbi Phelps completed her seventh novel: Sky Ranch, the story of being a New Yorker who marries an Idaho potato farmer and all the perils of life in Idaho. Sky Ranch won the 2020 Five-Star trophy from Literary Titans and the 2021 First Place Gold trophy from Feathered Quill. The Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE), founded by the class of ’68, organized a Reimagining Policing panel that included policing expert Professor Jack Glaser. This was part of a campus-wide series on Reimagining Democracy and was moderated by the Center Faculty Director (and class of ’68 member) Professor Dan Lindheim. Class Secretary: Diane Moreland Steenman, 2407 W. Hazelhurst Court, Anthem, AZ 85086, dsteenman@aol.com, 702/521-5237

Class secretary Dick Carter reports that he did not receive any notes from classmates this cycle, and therefore had to resort to sending something about his own activities. Dick is enjoying retirement in his hometown of Piedmont with his wife, Mary, and looking forward to his daughter’s wedding in the fall. He is a member of Piedmont’s Recreation Commission and was recently appointed to the city’s Capital Improvements Projects Review Committee. He has started

A mini-reunion of student workers in the Government Documents Department of Doe Library took place in April at Wildhorse Golf Course in Davis. Leo O’Farrell, Steve Roscow ’81, and your class secretary finished a close second in a tournament raising funds for public interest fellowships for law students. It was a great day. Class Secretary: Kevin Johnson, 232 Tern Place, Davis, CA 95616, krjohnson@ucdavis.edu

Neal Fandek, who graduated from Cal with degrees in journalism and history, published the third volume in his Peter Pike detective series based on historical mysteries. He writes: If not for the amazing professors I had at Berkeley, I’m not sure my interest in history would be so intense. They ignited a spark that keeps me going to this day. Class Secretaries: Linda Takimoto, Ltakimoto@yahoo.com, Tyler Hofinga, tylerhofinga@yahoo.com

Mark Fowler is the newly promoted U.S. chair of DLA Piper’s Intellectual Property and Technology practice. Serving Southern California for over 30 years, Mitchell D. Rosenberg, from the San Fernando Valley General Office of New York Life, has received the company’s Agent of the Year Award for 2020. Elizabeth (Libby) Boatwright,

CAL2 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

ClassNotes_SUM21_fnl.indd 2

5/19/21 10:24 AM

05192021122546

M.A. Theatre Arts, ’83 has just published a book, The Last Things We Talk About: Your Guide to End of Life Transitions, with Bull Publications. The book is a resource for those who are dealing with chronic illnesses and mortality issues and offers insight on creating a well-ordered legacy for heirs. Tracie White recently published her first book, The Puzzle Solver (Hachette Press), a bittersweet story about famous geneticist Ron Davis and his race to find a cure for ME/CFS in order to save his son, Whitney. Class Secretary: Patrick Doyle, 5 Third St. #600, San Francisco, CA 94103 patrick.doyle@mcginleydoyle.com

Grande Lum and Bertram Levine recently published their book, America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (U. of Missouri Press). WATG, one of the world’s leading travel and tourism design firms, has appointed Bryan Algeo, AIA as chairman of its board of directors.

Leslie Fields-Cruz, executive director of Black Public Media (BPM) has been named to Crain’s New York Business’ Notable Black Leaders and Executives list for 2021.

T ra c y S a l c e d o - C h o u r re won a National Outdoor Book Award for her guidebook: Hiking Lassen Volcanic National Park. Class Secretary: Brett Kanazawa, 651 Stamm Ave., Mountain View, CA 94040, (510) 550-6839

Michele Wong McSween has released Gordon & Li Li Celebrate Chinese New Year, the newest title in her Mandarin board book series. Readers learn about traditions and festivities of Chinese New Year, while learning new words in English and Mandarin. Michele’s original board book series was released as a compilation, My First Mandarin Words with Gordon & Li Li. Class Secretary: Michelle Segal, michelle_ segal@yahoo.com

Eireene Nealand’s translation (with Alta Ifland) of Marguerite Duras’s Le camion was published as The Darkroom by Contra Mundum in April 2021. Class Secretary: Antonia Lau, PO Box 948, Union City, CA 94587, antonia@cal.berkeley.edu

Linsey Marr, M.S. ’97, Ph.D. ’02, the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been recognized with the Ut Prosim Scholar Award–Virginia Tech’s top honor for faculty– for her research and efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and effectively educate the public on safety protocols.

Dr. Nithya Ramanathan has been selected as a TED Fellow. Dr. Ramanathan was selected for her work as founder and CEO of Nexleaf Analytics, a nonprofit using data and technology to improve the health of people around the world.

Susan R. Lin was named Master of Wine by the Institute of Masters of Wine, joining 417 Masters of Wine around the world, 56 in the U.S.

Susan Nance has published a new book, Rodeo: An Animal History (Univ. of Oklahoma Press). The book explores how rodeo has reflected rural western beliefs and assumptions about the natural world that have led to environmental crises and served the beef empire. Class Secretary: Amy Lei, kamylei@alumni. haas.org

Patricia (Patti) Jeng has been promoted to partner at law firm Sheppard Mullin.

Biology department, etc. Our music delves into, and hopes to start global conversation about, futuristic concepts in science, artificial intelligence, and the future of companionship. Erica (Youyou) Yang is now an associate attorney at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in Chicago. In June 2020 she co-founded a legal clinic, Lawyers Helping Our Community, to address the legal challenges Asian American communities face amid the COVID crisis. Monica Huerta has published Magical Habits, a new experimental memoir. In genres including personal and critical essays, fairy tales, fictional monologues, and ephemera such as menus and family photographs, Huerta tells the story of her family’s chain of Mexican restaurants in Chicagoland to shed light on the larger picture of immigration and assimilation in the U.S. We currently have no class secretary listed for the following classes: ’29–’31, ’35, ’39, ’41, ’49, ’97, ’00, ’06 –’08, ’10–’14, and ’16–’20. If you are the class secretary, please contact the magazine office at classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu or 510/642-5981.

Roderick Gaerlan is entering his 10th year working in sports and capped a successful fourth season as the luxury suite sales executive for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Prior to the NFL, Roderick worked at Cal Athletics from 2015-2017.

Uliya is a Houston, Texas-based, queer, South Asian, they/them pronounusing, DIY singer-songwriter-producer and sound engineer. You can find them on Spotify. Their new EP is called Breathe Me In. It’s about how loving someone else, in whatever way, is a risk worth taking. Amanda Dennis has published her debut novel, Her Here, an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself.

Linda Xu has joined Cart.com as their new chief of growth officer. Ashish Pradhan has been promoted to vice president of Cornerstone Research.

Erica Butow, MBA ’14 has been recognised as social entrepreneur of the year at Brazil’s Mulheres que Transformam awards. She co-founded Ensina Brasil, an organization that recruits and trains recent graduates from Brazil’s top universities to become public school teachers in some of the country’s poorest areas. Ensina Brasil is part of the Teach for All global network. Christina Tan is co-creator and lyricist of many of the songs included in a new musical, Fantasy of Companionship for Piano and Orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road Studios and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. She writes: Much of the music was inspired by my memorable undergraduate experiences at Cal, including Cafe Strada, Strawberry Creek,

Watch this space for exciting news about Class Notes. We’ll be sharing some new developments in the Fall issue as we modernize the CAA website and add new functionality to make sharing news and updates with classmates easier than ever. Class Secretaries: Email your notes (classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu) with “Class year” in the subject line. You can also mail a hard copy to Class Notes, California magazine, CAA, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720-7520. Please bold class members’ names; each class is limited to 250 words. Read our submission guidelines at alumni.berkeley. edu/classnotes. Class notes might be posted on CAA’s website. Can’t Find Your Secretary? Email classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu, or call 510/900-8246 for names and contact info. Submissions deadlines: Fall 2021 issue: July 2 Winter 2021 issue: Sep. 24

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 CAL3

ClassNotes_SUM21_fnl.indd 3

5/19/21 10:24 AM

05192021122546

Snapp Chats Alumni Notes from Martin Snapp, J.D. ’72

And presiding over it all is executive producer Harvey Myman, who got his bachelor’s from Cal in English literature in 1970 and his master’s in journalism in 1992. “I think I hold the record for the amount of time between my coursework and my thesis,” he says. “I came back to the J-school to give the commencement address, and the dean said, ‘Harvey, it’s embarrassing that you haven’t gotten your degree.’ So I finally finished my thesis.” By then he was the managing editor for news at the Orange County Register and was instrumental in turning the paper from an afterthought into a Pulitzer Prize winner with a national reputation. The first Pulitzer was for the photo coverage of the 1984 Olympic Games, which he supervised. It was a complete makeover. The company that owned the Register, Freedom Newspapers, had a deep libertarian bent that affected all parts of the operation. “They had word lists. Martin Luther King could not be referred to as Dr. King; public schools were ‘tax-supported schools.’ It was insane.” One of the assurances he was given coming in was that the newsroom would be completely separate from the editorial page. And that independence was occasionally reflected in editorials that would complain about the news coverage. “It was like starting from scratch. We were a little like the old Oakland Raiders. We had these wildly talented people, a lot of whom were misfits that we brought in from around the country. For whatever reasons, things didn’t quite work out for them at the New York Times or the Dallas Morning News; but they were terrific writers and phenomenal reporters, and we created a home for them.

Mastermind: Harvey Myman went from managing editor to network executive to independent producer of Masterpiece Theater’s Miss Scarlet & the Duke.

“On the day we found out we were one of the finalists [for the Pulitzer], I called the five photographers into my office, and said, ‘I would love you guys to win this; but win or lose, it doesn’t make what you guys did any better or worse.’ But when we won, it was like a World Series locker room, with champagne everywhere.” Other papers soon came calling, including the New York Times. “Because of the nature of newspapers, at some point you become kind of cute and popular. But I thought, ‘Do I really want to do another newspaper? Or do I want to do something completely different?’ And I started exploring the notion of going to entertainment. I didn’t feel confident that I could sit down and write spec scripts, so I basically sold myself as a guy who can read and write English and manage people.” He started at ABC as a programming executive.

“After about a year they moved me to comedy development, and I worked on a bunch of them, including Roseanne and Home Improvement. Looking back, they gave me a lot of difficult shows and some of the more difficult showrunners because writers have always been my people, and most executives are terrified of writers. So all those managing editor skills translated to being an executive, and ultimately an executive producer.” After about five years at ABC, Myman joined the Carsey-Werner company, home of That ’70s Show and 3rd Rock, then moved to Sony as an executive, then to HBO before forming his own production company, Element 8 Entertainment, with two partners, one of whom is also an Old Blue, Jin Ishimoto ’90. Their first production: Miss Scarlet. “We basically shot the six episodes in season one in 50-some-odd days straight. Everybody was out to pull together; this was not a luxury cruise. We

CAL4 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Snapp_SUM21_fnl3_crx.indd 4

5/21/21 3:51 PM

05212021175307

CAPITOLO: COURTESY OF JENNIFER CAPITOLO; STEVENS: COURTESY OF ERIC AND AMANDA STEVENS

year, both British period productions. One was no surprise: All Creatures Great and Small, which already had a built-in audience from the original series that ran from 1978 to 1990. But the other came out of the blue: Miss Scarlet and the Duke, a detective story set in 1880s Victorian England, featuring a plucky heroine, a dashing but slightly sketchy leading man, plot twists, and a will-they-won’t-they tension that harks back to Moonlighting in its prime.

MYMAN: COURTESY HARVEY MYMAN; MISS SCARLET: ELEMENT 8 ENTERTAINMENT

PBS’S MASTERPIECE FRANCHISE HAD TWO RUNAWAY HITS THIS

had a great director, Declan O’Dwyer, who really helped create a vision and a look for the show. And it was obvious that this was a labor of love for everyone—the costume designers, the set designers, the writers, the actors—and when that happens and it all comes together, it’s a really beautiful thing.” And that’s reflected in the ratings, so much that PBS has already picked up the option for the next season, with planning and prepping already underway for the season after that. “Being an executive producer is a lot like being a managing editor again,” says Myman. “It’s my job to help make a terrific thing even better.”

THE SUCCESS OF ANCIENT ROME WAS at least partly due to engineering marvels like the aqueducts that delivered a reliable supply of water to all social strata of the Roman population for hundreds of years.

CAPITOLO: COURTESY OF JENNIFER CAPITOLO; STEVENS: COURTESY OF ERIC AND AMANDA STEVENS

MYMAN: COURTESY HARVEY MYMAN; MISS SCARLET: ELEMENT 8 ENTERTAINMENT

If anyone knows the role that water plays in keeping societies stable, it’s Jennifer Capitolo, M.S.W. ’03, executive director of the California Water Association. Her job is to advocate on behalf of water utilities that are regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission—as opposed to water utilities that are owned by local governments—and the people they serve. “At CWA, the members’ customers are our customers,” she says. And in this era, when California’s population keeps growing but its water supply does not, a large part of that job consists of making sure the cost doesn’t fall unevenly. “Affordability is something that we’re all concerned about,” she says. “Water continues to increase in price just like everything else. And when you’re providing an essential service, and water is essential, we have to figure out how to balance affordability and make sure that no one is struggling to pay for something that is essential.” To this end, she’s trying to convince the state to scrap a separate program for California PUC-regulated utilities in which some customers have to pay twice for the same service— directly as monthly rates on their water bills and indirectly as taxpayers—and replace it with a single system that creates a statewide, pooled low-income ratepayer assistance program and amortizes the low-income discount more evenly throughout the whole state. A real life example: San Gabriel Valley, where almost all of the communities are low-income. “So when you try to create a local program to offer a discount,” Capitolo says, “you end up having low-income or middle-income people subsidizing the very lowincome because you don’t have a high-income population in the water utility’s service area.” The solution, she says, is to pool the cost statewide, where all water utilities in the state pay into a single fund, and the program is administered statewide.

“[This problem] is unique to water utilities because we have 7,000 drinking water utilities in California; and when you have 7,000 systems, they’re very small and very localized geographically, so you don’t have that ability to redistribute wealth. Compare that to energy utilities: We have three large energy utilities, and those three represent big swaths of the state of California. So they have a good mix of high income and low income to make those programs work. But because there are so many water utilities, and we’re so spread out all across the state, we don’t have the ability to have a local program. You need a statewide program.” Naturally, that requires a lot of meetings with decision makers in Sacramento, and Capitolo says it was the lessons she learned at Cal that gave her the skills to do that. “I’m really a social worker working in the water industry. Part of what I do is helping to build consensus public policy ideas and just listening. That’s what we try to do in the social work field: listening to people and understanding their points of view and where they’re coming from and why they’re sitting at that table with the position that they have.” It’s not a job she ever thought she’d have. “I didn’t choose water; water chose me.” Unhappily, her two sons, ages 5 and 9, are unimpressed. “I’ve been telling them water jokes lately,” she says. “And they don’t think I’m funny at all.”

FINALLY, DO YOU REMEMBER ERIC STEVENS ’12, the captain of the football team, and his wife, Cal soccer star Amanda Glass Stevens ’13, who have been battling his Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was diagnosed 30 days after their wedding? The fight goes on, but in the meantime a third person has joined the team. Meet Peyton James Stevens, Class of 2044, who was born January 21. Weight: 6 lbs. 4 oz. Height: 19 inches. “This past week has been a dream,” Amanda wrote on Instagram. “You are just what we needed, little girl.”

Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@comcast.net. CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 CAL5

Snapp_SUM21_fnl3_crx.indd 5

5/21/21 3:51 PM

05212021175307

In Memoriam

Betty Courtright Keogh, Jan. Betty met her husband Jim while they were students at Cal, and they were inseparable for 55 years (except for two years during WWII). Unfortunately, Betty had to spend her last three decades without her soulmate, but she did so with grace and fierce independence. In her last months, she often asked her son, Brian, to read to her from California. Betty passed away at age 101.

Robert Wendell Luhr, Feb. 28 in Lake Oswego, OR. Bob worked hard to reduce his height but was unable to join the military, at 6'7". A proud member of Phi Gamma Delta, he met his soulmate of 71 years, Virginia, at Delta Delta Delta. Bob started his career at Cutter Labs and later joined GATX. He adored the mountains and enjoyed hiking and fishing. He is survived by his children, Kathy and David, and four grandchildren.

Joan Lynch Coan, June 1, 2020 in Waldwick, NJ. Joan was a Navy Veteran and used the GI bill to enroll at UC Berkeley, against her parents wishes. It was the beginning of higher education in her family. She is survived by five children, 15 grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren.

Dean Solinsky, May 10, 2020 in Eureka. Dean served in WWII with the Army Air Corps. Post-war, he graduated from Cal and worked with his brother Frank in their consulting firm. Dean was one of the first members of the California Chapter of the Association of Consulting Foresters. In 2005 he received the ACF Distinguished Forester Award.

Barbara Franke Boyle, Oct. 3 in Walnut Creek. Barbara worked in real estate for several decades, earning her broker’s license and serving as an officer of the Contra Costa Board of Realtors. She supported the Cal Alumni Association, Lafayette Historical Society, and Lamorinda Democratic Club. She is survived by her three children, Jerry ’76, Randy ’80, and Judi ’83, and granddaughter, Emily. Walter K. Janssen, M.D., Jan. 17 in Huntington Beach. Walt and his wife, Diane ’51, met at a Cal fraternity mixer and were happily married for 60 years. Donations may be made in Walter’s name to the Scott K. Janssen Memorial Scholarship Fund. He is survived by his daughter, Laura. Glen Mortensen, Feb. 19 in Stockton. Born and raised in Utah, Glen served in WWII in England repairing B-17s. Afterward, he studied at Cal and met his wife, Carolyn ’47. Glen

was the primary architect for the School of Pharmacy at U.O.P. and the Woodruff Regional Occupational Center. His most notable design is Burn’s Tower at U.O.P. Glen loved singing with the Stockton Chorale and the barbershop chorus, the Portsmen. He is survived by children Dean, Marit, and Farel ’80; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Suzanne Adelson, Sept. 16 in Chula Vista. Born in Brussels, Suzanne worked in Germany for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), helping to resettle concentration camp survivors, before immigrating to the U.S. and obtaining her B.A. from Cal and M.A. from City College of New York. As a social worker in San Francisco, Suzanne developed an affordable senior housing project. In 1979, she returned to school to get her doctorate and later worked for Child Protective Services. She enjoyed painting, cooking, and walking around the Lafayette Reservoir. David A. Young, March 2 in Folsom. A licensed professional engineer, David enjoyed a 50-year career as a consulting engineer. He served 14 years as city engineer of Petaluma, followed by consulting on public works and private development projects in Arizona and California. He is survived by his wife, Doris, two children, and two granddaughters.

Carol (Orchison) West, Nov. 17 in Moraga. Carol treasured the many friendships she formed with her fellow Cal alumni over the years and remained a diehard Bears fan throughout her life. She is survived by her three children, Marianne, Nancy, and Jim ’88, and eight grandchildren.

Robert Uphoff, Feb. 25 in Santa Barbara. After graduating in business, Bob began making and selling dental instruments and distributing innovative surgical needle-holders to hospitals nationally. During a trip to Manhattan Beach, Bob met his wife and lifelong travel companion, Inge. Bob played on the Berkeley water polo and swim teams and later enjoyed coaching and entertaining kids in the family pool. He is survived by his wife, two children, and one grandchild.

Ann Hawley, Jan. 30 in Walnut Creek. Ann is survived by a niece, two nephews, several grand- and great-grandnieces and nephews, and a daughter in heart, Amy Worth ’75.

Henry Lurie, M.S. ’58, Ph.D. ’61, March 6 in Rancho Palos Verdes. Henry was a loving husband, father, brother,

Barbara Perasso Levenson, Feb. 7 in San Rafael. Barbara taught grammar school for over 30 years. She met her husband, Howard, at a Cal Homecoming Dance, and they were married for 59 years. Barbara was a member of the Cal Ice Skating Club, spoke Italian, loved to water and snow ski, and traveled frequently to Italy to visit relatives. She was a Lifetime member of the Cal Alumni Association. She leaves her husband, Howard; daughters, Laurie and Shelley; two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. Edward H. Peterson, Feb. 17 in Indian Wells. Ed received a B.S. in business from Cal, and enjoyed a long career in real estate. He was a Bear Backer, a Berkeley Fellow, and served as chairman of the UC Berkeley Foundation and Northern California co-chair of the Keeping the Promise Campaign. The Mark Twain bench in the Doe Library was one of his fondest philanthropic accomplishments. He received the Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award and the Chancellor’s Award. He is survived by his two siblings, three children, eight grandchildren, niece, and nephew.

John Harvey Miller, Jan. 11 in Pasadena. John died as a result of Alzheimer’s and COVID-19. He was a Bowlesman, a member of the varsity crew, and Naval ROTC . He is survived by his wife, Carlene Clarke Miller, Ph.D. ’81.

Charles Shere, Dec. 15 in Healdsburg. Charles grew up in Berkeley and rural Sebastopol. He graduated from Cal with a degree in English, studied musical composition and conducting, and had a long, varied career in Bay Area music, art, and media. He founded and published the new-music magazine Ear and authored many books. He and Lindsey, his wife of 63 years, were founding partners of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant. Charles is survived by his brother, Jim; sons, Lee and Paolo; daughters, Thérèse and Giovanna; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. John “Jack” Forsyth Helms, MBA ’60, Jan. 22 in Walnut Creek. Jack received an accounting degree from the U. of Washington, served three years as an officer in the U.S. Navy,

CAL6 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Obits_SUM21_fnl.indd 6

5/18/21 9:34 AM

05182021121412

ALAN MCEWAN / COURTESY OF HARPER COLLINS

and loyal friend, as well as an accomplished engineer, bridge player, and classical music aficionado. After fleeing Nazi Germany to Israel, he immigrated to the U.S. A firstgeneration college student, he studied engineering at Cal, earning the University Medal as an undergraduate. Henry was a longtime camper at the Lair of the Bear and a member of the CAA Board of Directors. In 1993, he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineering Alumni. Henry is survived by his wife Inga; brother, Joel ’69; daughters, Suszi ’88 and Kathy; Inga’s children; and six grandchildren.

and earned an MBA at Haas. He worked in various information technology and financial positions. After his retirement, he and his wife, Julie, studied Spanish, traveled to Mexico and Central America, and spent time at their Lake Tahoe cabin. He is survived by his son, David; daughter, Laurie; and five grandchildren.

Donald Duane Carmony, Ph.D. ’61, Jan. 14 in Walnut Creek. Duane, an accomplished particle physicist, passed away due to COVID-19. During his tenure at Purdue University, he mentored many students. His research into atomic structure was published in journals and textbooks, and he was inducted into the American Physical Society. An avid bird watcher, Duane amassed a “life list” of 2,500+ species. He is survived by two children and three grandchildren.

Anthony E. Way, Dec. 5 in Ashland, OR . Tony attended UCLA before transferring to Cal, where he earned his B.S. and M.S. in zoology. Tony received his M.D. from UCSF and later served as faculty at UC Davis. At age 54, he earned an MBA from Golden Gate University. He practiced urology in Petaluma for 22 years and later worked as Chief Medical Consultant for the California Dept. of Health. Tony toured the U.S. in an RV, traveled to Bermuda, Mexico, and Europe, and consulted in Zambia. He is survived by his wife, Joy; sons, Dylan and Christopher; and two grandchildren.

Joan (Chin) Quock, Oct. 29 in Kailua, HI. Joan was married for over 50 years to Steve Quock, who studied at the College of Environmental Design. She is survived by two children and three grandchildren.

Gail (Franchini) Green, Jan. 23 in Vancouver, WA. At Cal she was an Alpha Phi and met her husband, Cal football player James Edward Green ’61. They had two children before James died of ALS in 1985. Gail served as the Larkspur Finance Director in the 90s and later moved to Vancouver. She married again in 2014. She is survived by her husband, Joe; children, Jim and Susan; sister, Carol ’64; brother, William ’69; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Henry (Hank) Richard Herrera, Nov. 19 in Casper, WY. Hank had a long career as a psychiatrist before transitioning to farming, land trusts, and food equity. He served at Standing Rock and worked with the Ohlone community, the Gill Tract Farm, and food justice projects on the Wind River Reservation. He is survived by his children, Catherine, James, Susan, David, Adriana, and Gregory; grandchildren, including Pablo ’19; and soulmate, Lisa.

Robert LaLiberte, August 25 in Carmichael. Bob was head yell leader for the Bears and President of Tau Kappa Epsilon. He worked for the State of California in public policy and administration and retired after 25 years with the Department of Education. He is survived by two children and five grandsons.

Robert J. Renouf, March 16 in Livermore. Robert was a member of Sigma Phi Delta, the professional engineering fraternity, a registered professional electrical engineer in California, and a PG&E employee for 27 years. He enlisted in the Air Force Reserves in 1966, was called to active duty after the USS Pueblo incident, and retired as

ALAN MCEWAN / COURTESY OF HARPER COLLINS

BEVERLY CLEARY ’38 It was a quiet morning at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley during World War II. Beverly Cleary, who was working at the shop, idly picked up a children’s book. “‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass,’ said the puppy,” she read, as she later recalled in a memoir. “How ridiculous,” she thought. “No puppy I had known talked like that.” In those days, books were filled with children who had nannies and were always well-behaved. Where were the feisty kids who ate with their mouths open, who slammed doors, who had families with financial worries? Wanting to see books that reflected real life, she decided to write them herself. She went on to become one of the world’s most cherished authors, enchanting young readers with such classic characters as Ramona Quimby and Ralph S. Mouse. Cleary died on March 25 in Carmel at age 104. Born in McMinnville, Oregon, in 1916, Beverly Atlee Bunn was raised an only child on a farm in the Willamette Valley town of Yamhill, which didn’t have a library until her mother established one. It wasn’t an easy childhood. Her family lost their farm when Cleary was only 6 and had to relocate to Portland. Her father lost his job in

a staff sergeant in 1972. He is survived by his wife, Linda ’66; children, Stephen ’90 and Mark; and two grandchildren.

Donald Earl Schlotz, J.D. ’74, Feb. 12 in Oakland. Don lettered in wrestling at Cal and served in Vietnam as a combat engineer. After studying at Berkeley Law, he had a successful legal career in San Francisco. He traveled widely and loved live music. Don was a Cal sports fanatic, a member of Big C, and a Bear Backer.

Brian Kahn, J.D. ’73, Oct. 29 in Montana. While at Boalt Law School, Brian was varsity head coach of the Cal Boxing team, for which he competed as an undergrad. He served on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and was later elected president of the California Fish and Game Commission. A Montana Governor’s Award recipient, Brian helped restore the almost-extinct California Condor, produced acclaimed documentaries, Return of the Desert Bighorn and A Thousand Cranes, directed the Montana Nature Conservancy, and founded the Artemis Wildlife Foundation. His public radio show, Home Ground Radio, aired for 24 years in the Rocky Mountain West.

Lois Sims Stack, June 28. Lois was born in Southern California and “grew up in Orange County when it was full of orange groves.” Lois earned her undergraduate degree in art history. She enjoyed traveling, visiting her grandchildren, and teaching Sunday school. When she passed, she had just spoken with her brother, Lowell, and was holding hands with her husband, Stephen, her dear friend, Moe, and child, Amy.

the Depression, an experience that inspired the plot of Ramona and Her Father (1977). These early years are the backbone of her work. “In my books I write for the child within myself,” Cleary told the The Oregonian in 1961. “I simply write the books I wanted to read when I used to put on my roller skates and go to the branch library.” Beverly Bunn graduated from Berkeley in 1938 with a degree in English. Two years later, she married Clarence Cleary, a graduate student she had met at Cal. Cleary started writing books in her early 30s, and in 1950 she published Henry Huggins, her first of more than 40 books. In her nearly half-century-long career, Cleary continued to bring her life into her writing, including her twins, who inspired the book Mitch and Amy. Cleary enjoyed numerous honors and distinctions. She was declared a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress in 2000 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2003. She is the namesake of a Berkeley campus residence hall. Her work has been published in over 14 different languages and sold more than 90 million copies. Asked on NBC’S Today show what she was most proud of, the author said simply: “the fact that children love my books.” Cleary is survived by her two children, Malcolm and Marianne, three grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. —N.A.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 CAL7

Obits_SUM21_fnl_crx.indd 7

5/21/21 3:32 PM

05212021173510

Dennis Gallagher, March 19, 2020. An artist, music lover, and athlete, Dennis studied design at Cal, where he met his wife, Ruth. Afterward, he taught typography at UC Davis, later worked in the art department at the San Francisco Chronicle, and served as art director of California Monthly. Casey Scott McKeever, Feb. 4 in Woodland. Casey earned a B.A. in political science, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating from Stanford Law, he spent his 41-year legal career helping people in need, working for Legal Services of Northern California, the Western Center on Law and Poverty, and California State’s Assembly Committee on Human Services. Casey met his wife, Anne ’74, in Freeborn Hall the year it became co-ed. He is survived by Anne; two daughters, Katie and Amy; and four grandchildren. Dianne Elizabeth Street, Oct. 13. Dee Dee joined Alpha Delta Pi, was elected an ASUC senator, served with leadership of Pan-Hellenic, and became a member of Prytanean and Order of the Golden Bear. She loved traveling, history, reading, bridge, golf, and, most of all, friends and family, including her Labrador retrievers. She is survived by her husband, Reginald ’74 and son, Reginald Jr. ’11.

Stan Karas, J.D. ’01, March 23, 2020 in Studio City. He will be remembered for his acerbic wit, intellect, and easy going demeanor. Stan was involved with the California Law Review and the Berkeley Technology Journal. He practiced intellectual property, securities and complex civil litigation. He is survived by his mother, Victoria.

Elizabeth R. Bird, March 28 in New York City. She was pursuing a Ph.D. in Media & Film at Berkeley. She is survived by her wife, Betti-Sue, and son, Mateus.

Coco Chan, Jan. 29. Coco was an undergraduate in the College of Letters & Science. She is survived by her mother, Man Ingenthorn, father, Cho Yiu Chan, and her brother, Wai Ting Chan.

FACULTY AND STAFF Raul Abesamis, March 1 in Danville. Raul was manager of Energy Management in UC Berkeley Facilities Services. Edwin Dugger, Jan. 20 in Charlottesville, VA. Edwin studied at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and Princeton University before beginning his 35-year tenure at Cal, where he taught music composition and analysis. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Naumberg Award, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Prize. His works reside in Oberlin Conservatory Library and have been performed around the world.

He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Kathryn; son, Alan; and two granddaughters. David Jenkins, March 6 in Oakland. A professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and wastewater treatment expert, David was affectionately known as the “FlocDoc,” for his research on the mass of microorganisms in wastewater and the absorbed organic and inorganic materials that clump together during the activated sludge process. He was a National Academy of Engineering member and a Chartered Institution of Water Environment and Management fellow. Robert L. Middlekauff, March 10. The Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History Emeritus, Robert joined Cal’s faculty in 1962 after serving in the U.S. Marines and receiving his Ph.D. from Yale. At Cal, Robert served as provost, dean of the College of Letters and Science, dean of social sciences, and history department chair. His book, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 17631789, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1983. He received the Berkeley Citation and the Distinguished Teaching Award. Robert is survived by his wife, Beverly; son, Samuel; daughter, Holly; and three grandchildren. Denise Puzzuto, March 13. Denise was a nurse for over 43 years. After retirement she worked part-time at University Health Services. She is survived by children, Mikaela and Sean; two grandchildren; and her partner, Bill. Paul Rabinow, April 6 in Berkeley. A professor emeritus of anthropology, Paul joined the Cal faculty in 1978 after earning his Ph.D. from Chicago. His scholarship covered many topics, including medical anthropology and the ramifications of synthetic biology. His book Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco is considered a model ethnography. Paul was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and coined the concept of biosociality, the shared experience of sickness and suffering. He is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and son, Marc. Robert B. Ruddell, March 14 in Oakland. During Robert’s 35+ years at Cal, he became a full professor, served as acting dean of education, and worked closely with his ’86 Ed.D. and Ph.D. students. He published numerous articles and wrote 12 textbooks about literacy, including the successful Pathfinder series. He received the William S. Gray Citation of Merit and the Oscar S. Causey Research Award and was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 1989. Robert is survived by his spouse, Sandy; daughter, Amy; son, Robert; and three grandchildren. Nilabh Shastri, Jan. 22. Nilabh grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas and obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the All India Institute of Medical Science. He came to

the U.S. in 1981 to join a lab at UCLA, then at CalTech. In 1987, he set up his own lab at Cal, and rose to full professor. He is survived by his wife, Amita; daughter, Avantika; and two grandsons. David A. Shirley, March 3. David, former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was a professor emeritus of chemistry. He won the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. A pioneer of electron spectroscopy, David spearheaded the creation of the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab and helped construct third-generation synchrotron radiation facilities. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and five children. Isadore Singer, Feb. 11. Isadore was professor emeritus of mathematics at Berkeley and cofounder of Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. He was known for his work in topology, differential equations, and physics, which led to the famous Atiyah–Singer index theorem. He received many awards, including the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the National Medal of Science, and the Abel Prize. Sylvia Snow, Feb. 15. Sylvia was an administrative assistant in facilities services at Cal. Martin Wachs, April 11. A preeminent figure in transportation planning, Marty authored more than 160 articles and five books on transportation systems and other topics. As a professor at Cal and UCLA, he won awards for teaching and graduate advising. Marty served as chair of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and was a member of the California High Speed Rail Peer Review Group. He is survived by his wife, Helen.

For In Memoriam guidelines, please visit Californiamag.org/obits. We prefer that you email submissions to obits@alumni.berkeley.edu with “Obituary: first name, last name, class year” in the subject line, but you can also fax them to 510/642-6252 or mail a hard copy to In Memoriam, California magazine, CAA, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720-7520. Submissions may be edited for length and clarity. Submissions deadlines: Fall 2021 issue: July 2 Winter 2021 issue: Sep 24

CAL8 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Obits_SUM21_fnl.indd 8

5/18/21 9:34 AM

05182021121414

The Peace of Mind folks EBRATIN EL

BEST

of Oakland

YEARS B U SIN ES

2017 - 2020

Our team is here to solve your plumbing, heating and cooling problems!

Lic. #414359

510.609.3775 • AlbertNahmanServices.com

Alumni House Rentals Book your celebration on campus!

alumni.berkeley.edu/rentals reservations@alumni.berkeley.edu | 510.900.8228

FP ADS_SUM21.indd 57

5/13/21 7:21 AM

Please do what you can. You can make the difference, today.

Since 1897, California magazine has kept us connected to the world’s top public university and the issues we care about most. Like many organizations, the Cal Alumni Association (CAA), an independent 501(c)(3) organization, now faces a financial crisis that can only be resolved through the unprecedented generosity of our alumni, members, readers, and supporters. The future of CAA depends on you.

Show your support for the future of CAA. alumni.berkeley.edu/rise Scan this with your phone to learn more

FP ADS_SUM21_crx.indd 58

5/14/21 4:17 PM

Spotlight

Margaret Rhea Seddon ’70 came to Cal in 1965 from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It was an eye-opening, and liberating, experience for the Southern belle. As she recalls in her 2016 memoir, Go for Orbit: “While students at traditional colleges worried about the football team and dates, I worried about throatburning tear gas raining down from police helicopters or rounding a corner on campus to come face-to-face with National Guard troops in riot gear. Amidst the turmoil, however, new ways of thinking were developing. It was becoming more acceptable for women to plan careers, even unconventional ones.” For her part, Rhea Seddon went on to become an ER doctor, then an astronaut—part of the same NASA class as Sally Ride. As a veteran of three space shuttle missions, Seddon has orbited Earth nearly 500 times.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been circling Earth for nearly 21 years, but Leroy Chiao ’83, veteran of three space shuttle missions and former commander of the ISS, still remembers when, as he told the New York Times Magazine last year, “it had that new car smell.” Chiao, who retired from NASA in 2005, now heads up a speakers bureau called OneOrbit, makes regular media appearances, and tweets under the handle @AstroDude. Chiao, who also speaks Mandarin, learned Russian in order to communicate with the cosmonauts with whom he lived aboard the space station for several months. In 2019, he participated in an Oxford Union debate, arguing for the motion,“The Future Is In Space.” Chiao insisted that eliminating space flight programs would not only be detrimental, but would also plunge the world into a “death spiral.”

Ever wondered what it sounds like on Mars? Jason Achilles Mezilis ’96 is with you. The L.A. rock musician/producer designed and built a microphone for NASA’s Perseverance Rover, made to withstand the harsh conditions of our planetary cousin. After the rover touched down in February, Mezilis’s microphone recorded the sound of gusting wind on the Red Planet and beamed the audio file back to Earth. When it comes to the music scene, Mezili has done it all—performing, producing, and recording under the name Jason Achilles. Designing this microphone was an unlikely odyssey for Mezilis, one that grew out of his friendship with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer and which turned him into what Wired magazine called “a bona fide extraterrestrial audio engineer (a space roadie, if you like).”

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PATRICK WELSH

Asad Aboobaker ’00 has moxie. Or, at least, he’s working on bringing it to Mars. MOXIE, which stands for Mars Oxygen InSitu Resource Utilization Experiment, has a simple goal: take the atmospheric carbon dioxide of Mars and turn it into oxygen, the eventual source material for rocket fuel and, of course, astronaut-breathable air. Aboobaker, an instrument systems engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2014, graduated from Berkeley with bachelor’s degrees in physics and astrophysics before getting his doctorate in physics at Princeton. In his NASA bio, Aboobaker hints at the roots of his love for all things interstellar: “If you find yourself staring in awe at a star-filled night sky or marveling at rocket launch videos, you might be a space nerd like me.”

Steve Barajas ’10, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spearheaded construction of the Perseverance test model and played a key role in the design of the Mars rover’s chassis. After designs of the test model proved themselves satisfactory, Barajas hopped aboard the Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations Mechanical team, following the actual Perseverance Rover through further shakedowns (e.g., spin tests, shake tests, and various other trials), until it was ready to face the harsh conditions of the final frontier. What triggered Barajas’s space enthusiasm? A book about space his parents gave him in third grade. He pored over it, falling in love with the stars and their planets. Now, he’s part of that story.

The first Korean in space, Soyeon Yi, MBA ’14, came to Cal in 2010, after her stint aboard the ISS in 2008. Yi, who also has a doctorate in biotechnology from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, carried 1,000 fruit flies aboard the Soyuz rocket that ferried her to the ISS and proceeded to observe the effects of space on the flies’ behavior and genome. On Yi’s return to Earth her space capsule malfunctioned, landing some 300 miles off target, in a remote part of Kazakhstan, startling local inhabitants. “The nomads were surprised when Yuri [Malenchenko, the Russian flight engineer] climbed out of the capsule,” Yi told Korean television. “They very well would have been, since a ball of fire fell from the sky and then a white object crawled out of it.” — C.P.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER 2021 59

Spotlight_SUM21_fnl.indd 59

5/17/21 1:12 PM

05172021151419

IN HOUSE

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

T O

Graduating undergraduate Alumni Scholars from The Achievement Award Program (TAAP) join our new Class of 2021 alumni.

P A B t

D G

DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

In May of 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier saw police activity and then saw a man in pain.

60 ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU

InHouse_SUM21_01.indd 60

embody a deep commitment to serving others. We are honored to share reflections from TAAP scholars Pedro De Anza Plascencia ’21 and Yuner Lu ’21 on the following pages. The Cal Alumni Association launched Alumni Making a Difference, a virtual series of conversations between campus leaders and alumni navigating constant uncertainty and pain. The conversations highlight how service to others can bring about change and help with our own healing. Our mission, now, is the true work of healing: to protect the vulnerable, serve those in need, and shine the light of hope on our path forward. Each of us has a role to play. Each of us can, and must, be the light that casts out darkness. In the first episode of Alumni Making a Difference, Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, gives voice to our charge: “We need all of our alumni to keep building our strength and our place in the world.” Fiat Lux.

Executive Director Clothilde Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79

Images: Charles Poloka; Alexis Aguilar

She stopped, pulled out her cell phone, and began recording. During the trial, Frazier expressed, “When I think of George Floyd, I see my father, my brothers, my cousin, my uncle. They are all Black. It could have been them.” I write this after the Minneapolis jury convicted a local police officer in Floyd’s death. As a wife, mother, aunt, and grandmother of Black boys and men, I live in fear for their safety. This fear doesn’t go away, though I was a peace officer, former assistant district attorney, police commissioner, and one who understands the dynamics of excessive force. I have seen law enforcement officers put their lives on the line to protect our communities, and I have seen law enforcement officers represent the worst of what humanity has to offer. This year has been particularly painful for our communities of color. Fueled by anti-Asian scapegoating, a surge in violent crimes continues to cause fear and anguish in our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. We must stand up against racism in all its forms—and we must create space so that the voices of those marginalized can be heard. I am hopeful as I look to the Class of 2021, and to our graduating scholars from The Achievement Award Program (TAAP), who

I t l v w p y t t t l o y s v t n a y B h t t i

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

5/10/21 5:11 PM

c f I y w f n c

p I p

I l w b

Yourconnection connectionto toBerkeley. Berkeley.For ForLife. life. Your

TO OUR CHILDHOOD SELVES, THE POWER OF OUR FUTURE Pedro De Anda Plascencia and Yuner Lu are both Achievement Award Program (TAAP) Scholars in UC Berkeley’s Class of 2021. Below are excerpts from speeches the graduates delivered at this spring's TAAP Senior Brunch.

Dear FifthGrade Pedro,

Images: Charles Poloka; Alexis Aguilar

I want to begin by telling you that I love you. You are valid, and you are worthy of love and protection. While your friends are on the playground with their fresh sneakers, talking about the latest version of Call of Duty—you are in your head, trying to De Anda Plascencia ’21 now holds English search for the right and political science degrees. video game language, to make sure you are not othered. I want you to know that the emotions you are feeling inside are fine. They’re more than fine; they’re yours and they’re real. I want you to know that being gay is not bad. Do not feel ashamed as you play Barbies in the living room with your sisters, as your parents work long hours in swap meets, trying to make ends meet, struggling to make sure that you and your sisters can have your dollar to go to the corner store to get your bag of hot cheetos. These experiences will become our identity; there’s so much in store and so much to be proud of. There are many things I wish I could tell 10-year-old Pedro. I was processing my immigrant status, my queerness, and being in a low-income family, all of which I would later understand to be my intersectionality. I imagine it’s common for many fifth graders to have to care for their younger sisters, but I’m not sure how many fifth graders also have to worry about obtaining US residency; I did. The hope that our immediate family would not be separated by a stranger lingered over me. They had no clue how every morning I woke up to my mom bringing me warm choco milk; it was the only life I knew. Why would someone want to take that away? This is when I learned that not everyone had the same privilege my sister and I were granted when we gained US residency. I promised myself, from that point forward, I would do everything in my power to be ambitious with my dreams. I worked hard in school and worked hard to be the best sibling and son I could be. I stayed focused on growing myself academically and as a leader. Upon arriving at my UC Berkeley Unit 3 double, I was confronted with the reality that life away from my mom and her choco milk would be harder than I had anticipated. In my first year, I made about 23 calls to CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

InHouse_SUM21_01.indd 61

my mom daily, because it was hard to be ripped from the one who meant everything to me, and those calls were the only thing that made me feel like she was by my side. I think about the first time I stepped foot on campus. I think about entering that Southwest airplane as I made my way to Senior Weekend. I think about wide-eyed Pedro, so fascinated and enamored with the magnitude of Berkeley and the opportunities that awaited me, where I would eventually explore my dreams, my authentic self, and become the unapologetic Pedro that was once only a fixation of my fifth-grade imagination. I will be graduating with two degrees in English and political science, and it really took a village. I am in awe of the women in my life who have built me, supported me, and held me up when I could not sustain myself emotionally or financially. One of my fondest memories from this year is planning Senior Weekend for the incoming Class of 2025, engaging with newly admitted students of color! As I leave Berkeley, I am content with what I have accomplished, both inside and outside of the classroom. From the Dean’s List to being a Raices intern, a SLC writing tutor, the Latinx-endorsed ASUC Senator, and presently the bridges outreach director, I am humbled by what I have done and eager for what is to come. To the donors, alumni, and families who support our program: Thank you. Your financial contributions to our program are investments in our dreams and a reminder that community across lived experiences is what will push us forward into a brighter and collective future. As for what’s next? Postundergrad, I will be moving to Sacramento, where I will intern for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund with the goal of getting into law school and starting my own family. Fifth-grade Pedro, I feel like we are doing just fine, if you ask me. <3 Campaigning for ASUC Senator.

Sincerely, Pedro

continued on page 62 >>

ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU 61

5/10/21 5:11 PM

IN HOUSE

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION continued from page 61 >>

My name is Yuner Lu. I’m a senior studying electrical engineering and computer science at Cal, and I am honored to share my UC Berkeley journey with you. 2020 was a challenging year. The pandemic took many lives worldwide. As students at Cal, we have been confined to our homes in front of computers instead of being on campus. What I realized while quarantining for more than a year was the privilege I hold as a student at UC Berkeley, and how this privilege inspires me to push for social change. Even before quarantine, I knew Cal was not going to be an easy ride. Entering Cal in Fall 2019 as a transfer student, I was able to verify all the stories I had heard about how competitive Cal is, especially in computer science. I had to adjust and adapt, to prioritize my grades over everything else. In quarantine, I came to the realization that there is a visible Yuner Lu ’21 now holds wall between me and my peers. Class policies changed and a degree in electrical exceptions were made, but the difficulty of my classes didn’t engineering and change. I stayed in my room as I feared catching the virus. computer science. Hours, days, and weeks passed silently as I spent almost all waking hours in front of screens. It was deeply isolating, and life became meaningless at one point. But we each found a way to cope. For me, it was through a class: Engineering, the Environment, and Society. The issues of inequality we discussed in class played out in front of us. Essential workers had to constantly expose themselves to the threat of the virus. People of color were getting infected and dying in numbers disproportionate to their population. I realized that despite my emotional obstacles, I was lucky to not have to risk my life daily.

Images: UC Berkeley College of Engineering

“ What I realized while quarantining for more than a year was the privilege I hold as a student at UC Berkeley, and how this privilege inspires me to push for social change.” —Yuner Lu ’21

Now featuring the Osher Lifelong Learning series!

Community meets Activity in the heart of downtown Oakland.

Get ready for a very busy social schedule. Enjoy coffee with friends. Take a class. Attend a lecture, go on a shopping excursion and take in the rich cultural offerings of downtown Oakland. Or take a quick drive into nearby San Francisco or Berkeley. At Lake Park, every day can be a beautiful adventure. Call 510-273-2128 to learn more.

62 ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU

InHouse_SUM21_01.indd 62

1850 Alice St. | Oakland, CA 94612 www.lakeparkretirement.org RCFE License #011400369

COA #088

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

5/10/21 5:11 PM

Images: UC Berkeley College of Engineering

Through my class project, I was given a way to make a positive impact by working with a nonprofit, Communities for a Better Environment. Our branch fought for environmental justice and social equity for POC communities in East Oakland who are contending with fumes, particulate matters, and other forms of pollutants created by factories and crematoriums. Our team of four students worked with this nonprofit to create a web app that helps residents and volunteers search for the permits of businesses in their area to see if they are abiding by government regulations. After that, I joined the Social Good committee of my student club, Data Science Society of Berkeley, and continued to work with nonprofits. Through these experiences, I realized my ability to impact underserved communities. Today, I want to ask you to continue serving your community and uplifting each other. Although I have gone through difficulties as an immigrant living on my own, and had to support myself financially before I transferred, I am blessed to have had access to resources for success at Cal. I want to thank the Cal Alumni Association for helping us realize our dreams during a time that brought isolation and pain. As graduates from Cal, we have the power to make a positive impact on our society. Thank you. Lu’s engineering class provided a coping strategy during the pandemic year.

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

InHouse_SUM21_01.indd 63

Learn more about The Achievement Award Program and the bright undergraduate scholars it supports at alumni.berkeley.edu/achievement.

ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU 63

5/10/21 5:11 PM

First Person

in the process. Like, how are we going to be able to get back to doing what we love? But in one of the conversations I had with my coach, when the NCAA ended up canceling the season and then other national bodies started pulling out of the Olympics, he told me, “All of this— everything that’s happening right now—is going to end. It will end. Even though we don’t know when right now, it will end. And when it does, we need to be prepared for anything that comes next.” Training at home was really nice, but I missed my team, and I especially missed my coach. Most of the time I was out there alone, or my parents were able to come out and film me so I could see what sort of progress I was making. There were moments where it was really hard, but keeping my goal in mind and my eyes on the prize kept me going. I repeated my coach’s words like a mantra: “This is going to end. We need to be prepared.” I think that hoping there would be some light at the end of the tunnel but not knowing when it would come meant that I did everything I could to be ready for it when it arrived. Training definitely had to change a bit to suit the circumstances. Normally, we would be practicing in a certain way until indoors was over, around mid-March, and then we would transition into hammer throw in the spring and summer part of the season. Not knowing when that transition was coming—it felt a little bit like “just-in-case training.” We were still working on building that foundation, but always doing a little bit to be ready just in case they suddenly said, “Hey, we’re going to be able to have a meet in a month.” I think that sort of prepCamryn Rogers ’21 aration training was good because it teaches you to be As told to Katherine Blesie flexible and adaptable. But it was hard, too, at least for me, to know that I was training for this thing that might never happen. When they announced that the Olympics were going to be postponed, I was I showed up to my school’s track practice late—I heartbroken, of course. I was able to talk to a lot of other Canadian athletes and wasn’t even going to go—and I went to the back area of Olympians to see how they were handling everything. I wanted to know: What the track where there was this rusty cage, and the coach, were these more experienced competitors doing? What can I learn from them? Richard, pointed to a hammer and said, “Okay, throw What have they learned along the way? Most of them ended up saying the same that.” I said, “Excuse me, what is that? It looks like a thing: You just have to be prepared, and you just have to be flexible because murder weapon!” I picked it up, swung it around a couple nothing will ever go perfectly. You can’t predict everything. times like he showed me, said a quick prayer, and let it I hit a new lifetime best a few weeks ago when I was in Oregon, and I think go. And he kind of looked at me and crossed his arms that’s partially thanks to the time during lockdown to go out on my own and really and pursed his lips and said, “Okay, I think we can work work on those little parts of my throw that were inhibiting me. with that.” It makes me so excited to think that there’s still more to come—even if I That was my introduction to the sport, because hamachieve this one goal of qualifying for the Olympics this year, there are still so mer isn’t really a sport where you go to your parents and many goals that need to be met, so many throws to be taken. There’s always say, “Hey, my friends and I are going to go throw hammore you can do to get to that next level. It’s a long road but one that I’m very, mers after school.” I think when you have the chance to very, very pumped to be taking. be exposed to such an interesting event you have to take it. I did, and I fell in love with it. To see Camryn Rogers in action, watch our short film, “The Dragonfly When I went home last March, I planned to stay for and the Hammer.” https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/ the weekend and ended up staying for seven months. watch-dragonfly-and-hammer I think a lot of people, myself included, kind of got lost

ANDI ARAI

I didn’t play a sport until 2012, when I picked up my first hammer.

64 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

FirstPerson_SUM21_fnl mt.indd 64

5/21/21 9:00 AM

05212021110152

Golden Bears Life Membership Congratulations and thank you to our newest Golden Bears Life Members for expressing an ongoing allegiance to the past and future of our incomparable alma mater.

1950s

Aaron R. Eshman ’50 Alfreda H. Abbott ’53 Ronald G. Brocchini ’53, M.A. ’56 Kenneth H. Johnson ’53 Virginia H. Pyke ’53 Howard Wiggins ’54, J.D. ’60 Janet Knoeppel ’56 Wesley C. McDaniel ’56 Douglas A. Ryder ’57

1960s

Charles C. Besmehn II ’60 Charles B. Hall ’60 Janice E. Burkholder ’61, C.Esing ’62 Richard H. Foster, Jr. ’61, Ph.D. ’75 Robert K. Hoyt ’61 Patricia J. Walker ’61 Warren S. Burkholder, Jr. ’62 Margaret L. Williams ’62 Robert A. Saunders ’63 Roger B. Baron ’64 Colin W. Chiu ’64, MBA ’66 George R. Dutton ’64 Christine S. Stang ’64, M.L.S. ’66 Eileen C. Fredrikson ’65 Robert A. Jacobsen ’65, M.S. ’67 Dr. Jurg H. Bieri M.A. ’66 Dana C. Bradford, III J.D. ’66 John T. Nicoles ’66 Joan M. Rudolph ’66 Lawrence E. Taylor ’66, J.D. William M. Crosby ’67 Roderick J. Hayslett ’67 Arthur C. Braudrick, Jr. ’68 Dennis S. Enjaian ’68 Betty I. Goldblatt M.P.H. ’69 Gilder Lieberman ’69

1970s

Earnest W. Jackson, II ’70 Lynn E. Relfe ’70 Jane Soo Hoo ’70 Larry E. Bell MBA ’71 Edward I. Diokno ’71 Alfred Klein J.D. ’71 Janice E. Loux ’71 Dr. Rex A. Adams ’72 Richard T. Arita ’72 Paul S. Kane ’72 Joan B. Terry ’72, C.Esing. ’73 Louis A. Biagi ’73 Heather C. MacArthur ’73 Michael C. Dong ’74 Winston P. Fong ’74 Clarke B. Holland ’74 Garth Edward Tissol ’74, M.A. ’80, Ph.D. ’88 Susan E. Waters ’74, M.D.

Gregory K. Bennett ’75 John J. Fitzpatrick Ph.D. ’75 Robert S. McBain M.A. ’75 Nancy C. Mulvany ’75 Elizabeth L. Ambuhl C.Mult ’76 Dr. David W. McKinney ‘76, M.A. ’78 Yvonne H. Chang ’77 Mark R. Turner ’78 Pamela J. Dally-La Mica ’79

1980s

Gregory R. Anderson ’80 Gay Batistich Abuel-Saud ’80 Jacqueline A. Cattani M.P.H. ’80, Ph.D. ’84 Professor Swapan Chaterji M.A. ’80, Ph.D. ’82 Gianfranco Corti ’80, Ph.D. ’92 John N. Funk J.D. ’80 Linda A. Hexem ’80 Dr. Nancy E. Joste ’80 Cheryl Nakada ’80 Kenneth R. Wada ’80, M.S. ’83 David Nam-Ping Wong M.S. ’80 Sonali Bose ’81, MBA ’91 Karen K. Fujikawa ’81, M.S. ’84 Louie M. Giambattista ’81 Alan P. Greinetz ’81 Robert J. Jessen ’81 Amey Y. Lee ’81 Teri Primack Marias ’81 Dr. Mark D. Nichols ’81 Elizabeth J. Rimer MBA ’81 Dixie Mace Anderson ’82 Irene Naniche Gessling ’82 Karla A. Henning ’82 Robert G. Hubbell ’82 James T. Nelson M.S. ’82, Ph.D. ’88 Aura Pineda-Kamariotis ’82 James A. Slutman ’82 Steven W. Wallace ’82 Matthew J. Berube ’83 Julia M. Bradaric ’83 Jody L. Brown ’83 Carolyn A. Campbell ’83 Edward W. Kerwin ’83 Paul C. Ling ’83 Ron Petroff ’83 Mary L. Springer ’83 Robert K. Yasui ’83 Nathan W. Brennan ’84 Eden Rose Brown ’84 Trevor K. Cralle ’84 Susan A. Frieson ’84 Susan M. Greinetz ’84 Frank V. Hale, III ’84 Peter H. Hodges M.S. ’84, Ph.D. ’92 Kristin Hoye ‘84, M.L.S. ’87 Professor Nola J. Kennedy ’84, Ph.D. Lorraine L. Ling ’84 Dahlia Maria Moodie M.S.W. ’84 Mark B. Raineri ’84

Kathleen A. Rosenberry ’84, Ph.D. Brian P. Rousseve M.A. ’84 John N. Benun ’85 James G. Chun, Jr. ’85, M.D. Corinne Y. Martinez ’85 Professor Kamran M. Nemati M.Eng.’85, M.C.P. ’89, Ph.D. ’94 Alejandro Ortiz ’85 Mark A. Simitz ’85 Karen Wong ’85 Theodore L. Frankfort M.S.W. ’86 Bobby D. Landreth ’86 John W. Otterson ’86 Maj. Marvin A. Arostegui, Jr. ’87 Professor Frank Chuang ’87, Ph.D., M.D. T. Kevin Dang ’87 Charles D. Dethero ’87 Nadr E. Essabhoy ’87 Peter George M.S. ’87, Ph.D. ’90 Leslie Ehrmann Goldenberg ’87 Lawrence R. Lustig ’87, M.D. Jerome M. Manley, M.P.H. ’87, Psy.D. Dr. Arnaldo Moreno ’87 Panayiotis Papadopoulos M.S. ’87, Ph.D. ’91 Dr. Mirle Rabinowitz Bussell ’87 Garreth M. Saiki ’87, M.S. ’89 Heather M. Stover ’87 Elaine Y. L. Tam ’87 Teruo Utsumi ’87 Judy Zeigler ’87 David J. Kraska ’88, M.S. ’89 Caroline A. Peck ’88, M.P.H. ’04, M.D. Adam C. Ritter ’88, Esq. Tricia Soto ’88 Dr. Theodore A. Tanabe ’88 Robert L. Weinberg Ph.D. ’88 Donald Evan Williams ’88 Eric P. Barr ’89 Kathryn A. Farney ’89 David T. Hathaway ’89 Thomas M. Herndon ’89 Gifford N. Hesketh ’89 Johnson C. Lee ’89 Ashoorbell Moradkhan ’89 Philip R. Overbaugh M.Arch. ’89 David V. Sanker Ph.D. ’89, J.D. ’07 Sarah E. Steiner ’89 Dr. David M. Vidaurri ’89 Todd L. Zeldin MBA ’89

1990s

Mark D. Bradford ’90 Gregory H. Kurio ’90, M.D. Matthew W. Morris ’90 David J. Sally ’90 Gregg M. Schwenk ’90 Jorgen A. Blomberg ’91 Elizabeth M. Cooke ’91

Tai C. Doong ’91 James T. Harp ’91 Ka-Yin Li ’91 Michelle M. McCliman ’91, Esq. Nina G. Perry ’91 Michael K. Pierce ’91, M.A. ’96 Tonya R. Poe ’91, M.S. ’93 Chris Galvin ’92 William B. Hackett ’92 Duane F. James M.S. ’92 Dr. Michael N. Liang ’92 Caroline K. Menes ’92, Esq. Kenway W. Tam ’92, M.S. ’94 Jim H. Tsai ’92 Charlotte B. Cooney ’93, Ph.D. Michael R. Moore ’93 Joshua M. Bobrowsky ’94, M.P.H. Tamara F. Bock ’94 Dr. Valerie E. Charlton M.P.H. ’94 Colleen M. Cotter, M.A. ’94, Ph.D. ’96 Yuko K. Elliott ’94 Missie Huh ’94 Michael M. Markman ’94 Ana Maria I. Miliozzi ’94 Ernest D. Morrell C.Esing ’94, M.A. ’97, Ph.D. ’01 Jennifer Byde Myers ’94 Toan K. Pham ’94 Melinda T. Santos ’94 Alison S. Taur ’94 Dianne L. Wong ’94, O.D. ’01 John P. Young ’94, M.A., MBA ’21 James F. Berkheimer ’95 Marc D. Chodos ’95, M.D. Caitlin C. Doan ’95 Guadalupe Figueroa ’95 Dr. Heather R. Jones M.A. ’95, Ph.D. ’03 Pavitra Prabhakar ’95 Joel C. Rynes M.S. ’95, Ph.D. ’99 Jennifer J. Santos ’95, Esq. Benjamin S. Santos, Jr. ’95 John C. Wang ’95 Karen C. Chang ’96 Winnie K. Gan ’96 Wendi A. Gosliner M.P.H. ’96, Dr.P.H. ’13 Lisa C. Guzman ’96 May J. Kim ’96, Ph.D. Michelle S. Sweeney ’96 August Fern ’97 Charles N. Flanders, III ’97 Benjamin S. Lin ’97 Helen U. Uhrig MBA ’97 Susan L. Vasquez ’96 Krisna P. Chai ’98 Stanley Chao ’98 Kailine L. Choi ’98 Phil J. Choi ’98 Prof. Christopher E. Dames ’98, M.S. ’01 Kristina M. Dixon ’98 Tosha C. Ellison ’98 James Hao ’98

Stuart C. McMullen ’98, CPA Thomas E. Nichols ’98 Chintu Sharma ’98 Peggy Wilson M.S.W. ’98 Dr. Christina R. Boerner ’99 Kesha L. Cash ’99 Lisa Chao ’99 Wing Tung Chau ’99 Jason B. Cimmiyotti ’99 Fiona T. Hsu ’99, M.P.P. ’06 Sean W. Jaquez ’99, Esq. Edward J. Kim ’99 Kevin H. Ku ’99 Angela Lee ’99 Arthur A. Lipscomb ’99 Diana L. Lock J.D. ’99

2000s

Alex Blanter MBA ’00 Nirav K. Desai ’00 Jose L. Espinoza, II ’00 LeRoy M. Harris ’00 Donovan T. Lee ’00, Ph.D. ’09 Roland Lue ’00 Dat B. Luu ’00 Kathleen C. Tam ’00 Nancy N. Wang ’00, Ph.D. ’09 Melody Chao ’01 Theresa G. Ferrell ’01 Rosina M. Hernandez ’01 Devin G. Jones ’01 Chi-Sharn Lim ’01, M.S. ’02 Hong Cai M.I.M.S. ’02 Rodney B. Hancock ’02 Crystal K. Hoang ’02 Jason P. Min ’02 Marco A. Palmieri ’02 Sharon M. Rahban ’02 Joseph M. Tambornino MBA ’02 Daniel L. Brelsford ’03 Jennifer M. CapitoloM.S.W. ’03 Jorge A. Hernandez ’03, M.S. ’06 William B. Burnett ’04 Shivang R. Dave ’04 James R. Learned ’04 Michelle M. Ng ’04 Brian C. Pfeifer ’04 Dr. Jennifer C. Sowerwine, Ph.D. ’04 Julia C. Van Roo ’04 Israel Garcia ’05 Daniel H. Goto ’05 Joanna W. Ming ’05 Justin D. Yi ’05 J. Chris Campbell ’06 Jennifer A. Erdell MBA ’06 William J. Fisher J.D. ’06, M.A. ’06 Aliyah A. Khan ’06 Bunyada V. Kwong ’06 Chau N. Le M.S.W. ’06 Brian F. Mapel MBA ’06 W. Aaron Van Roo ’06 Scott K. Chung ’07 Dr. Walter K. Lucio M.P.H. ’07

Cynthia Z. Taylor ’07 Jennifer J. Hom ’08 Kim Liu M.S. ’91, MBA ’08 King L. Ma ’08 Summer Joi Ohlendorf ’08 Eva J. Cisneros ’09 Kelly Ling ’09, MBA ’15 Jane Renahan ’09

2010s

Amit Adalti ’10 Tiffany L. Chan O.D. ’10 Kenneth W. Nevarez MBA ’10 Shahab Sheikh-Bahaei Ph.D. ’10 Evan L. Yang ’10 Divyang K. Agrawal MBA ’11 Nicholas S. Devlin M.S ’11 Thomas A. Fitzpatrick MBA ’11 Nick A. Lee ’11, M.S. ’12 James M. Lucas M.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’14 Tram T. Pham ’11 Cody L. Xuereb ’11 Vanessa A. Chan ’12 Yang Liu ’12 Lucy Nguyen ’12 Milad Bayan ’13 Olivia A. Kingsford ’13 Nina Y. Lagpacan ’13 Max N. Mazza ’13 Sushma D. Bhatia MBA ’14 Ashwat Sehgal ’14 Ross E. Greer ’15 Jessica G. Li ’15 Audrey E. Bersot ’16 Aishwarya Aravind ’18 Nathan D. Dell’Orto ’18 Anthony N. DiPrinzio ’18 Shivani Mathur ’18 Maadhav K. Shah ’18 Alexander L. Aprea ’19 Ping S. Hale ’19 Ziou Song LL.M. ’19 Elsie Wiley ’19

2020s

Savannah N. Gray ’20 Sydney R. Julien ’20 Spencer J. Krause ’20

Friends of the University Christel D. Bieri Eric R. Braun Phillip Brinkman Richard M. Goldstein Professor John C. Hirsh Suganda Jutamulia Thomas L. Morrissey Dr. Malcolm S. Singer Dr. James E. Watson, III Katherine A. Weinkam Peter Yates

Become a Golden Bears Life Member today! 888.CAL.ALUM • alumni.berkeley.edu/goldenbears Golden Bears Life Membership: Current Life Members

(one time, tax-deductible payment)

New and Annual Members

COVADS_SUM21.indd 3

$300 $1,300

Future Golden Bears Life Members will be recognized in California magazine and will also receive a custom-made blue and gold Golden Bears lapel pin and a special new membership card. The list of Golden Bears Life Members above is accurate from January 7, 2021 to March 31, 2021.

5/12/21 4:50 PM

COVADS_SUM21.indd 4

5/12/21 4:50 PM

Summer 2021: A Completed Life

Articles inside

Last Will

First Person

In House

Spotlight

Editor’s Note

The Chancellor’s Letter

Episode 2001: A Space Hotel Odyssey

Now This

Mixed Media

Gleanings

Student View

Five Questions