Spring 2021: I, Robot, Poet, Muse

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I, Robot, Poet, Muse SPRING 2021 $4.95 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

AUTHORSHIP IN THE AGE OF AI THE PAPER AND THE PARK: A DAILY CAL STORY

Contents

KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES

“What if, armed with beautiful machines, writers could push their artform beyond its current boundaries, transcend the idea of authorship, even unravel the mysteries of the creative process? That could be revolutionary.”

24

ON THE COVER

32 The Park and

The Mechanical Muse

the Paper

Will AI write the next Great American Novel?

BY LAURA SMITH

Remembering the editorial that sparked the Daily Cal’s independence

BY DAVID DOZIER

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MELINDA BECK

SPRING 2021 VOL. 132 NO. 1

38

“A Day Unlike Any Other” Rep. Linda Sánchez, (D-Calif.) and Colin Allred, (D-Tex.) on the Capitol siege.

As told to KATH­ ERINE BLESIE AND LEAH WORTHINGTON

42 47 What’s So Funny Life and Death About Pure Mathematics, Søren Kierkegaard, and Computer Programming?

Three Berkeley alumni, writers for The Simpsons and Futurama, discuss the nerdier side of comedy.

BY DANO NISSEN

in the Colonies Professor Neil Tsutsui on what we can learn from how social insects deal with disease

BY LEAH WORTHINGTON

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 1

Departments

5 Inbox 7 Editor’s Note

Telegraph 9 Earthly Delight Spring has sprung, and the UC Botanical Garden awaits your visit.

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

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.

Listen to The Edge on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

51 Changemaker in Chief Q&A with UC Berkeley’s Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer, Rich Lyons

BY MADDY WEINBERG

10 Gleanings Kroeber Hall unnamed; Wu’s Forever Stamp; reading wandering minds; etc.

15 Five Questions Q&A with Lawrence Rosenthal, Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies

17 Now This An alt-meat menagerie

18 Mixed Media Joan Didion’s essay collection; Ben Goldberg’s clarinet diary; Dr. Q on Netflix; etc.

22 Big Picture Men’s golf on the march

BY PAT JOSEPH

Supplement Class Notes / Snapp Chats: Lise Pearlman on Lindbergh’s Case; Steve Mayer on personal finance; Xavier Johnson on the Rent Board / In Memoriam

58 In House News from CAA

6 4 Spotlight Berkeley in the Biden Administration

56 The Chancellor’s Letter COVID and the Arts

Online Exclusive Wondering what life has been like for Cal students during the pandemic? We asked Berkeley undergraduate Carly Tran to keep a video diary of her life under lockdown. Watch “Online, Offline, On Life.”

Our Podcast:

The Edge

Episode 9: You Say Couch Potato.

I Say Athlete.

How did video gaming make it from your parents’ basement to the big leagues? Laura and Leah discuss the rise of esports with student “athletes,” an administrator, and team owner/2019 Alumnus of the Year, Kevin Chou.

Find these and other exclusives at californiamag.org.

ART CREDIT IMPACT FOOD

Visit bit.ly/californiaedge for details.

The Gate

2 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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

Video Producer Marica Petrey ’12

Interns Katherine Blesie ’21

Fischer Davis Dano Nissen ’18 Advertising Sales

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OUR LAST ISSUE (“BLACK VOICES,” WINTER 2020) aroused strong feelings in some readers, a few of whom canceled their subscriptions. Jeff Boddington ’76 was one of those. He wrote to say that our “content no longer has even the pretense of lacking prejudice.

You bent over so far that you’ve now fallen over.” Similarly, Tom Russell ’76 wrote that he was “tired of our politics” and that our publication “did not help alumni relations.”

A couple of responses were, frankly, too hateful and racist to share here.

There were some positive responses as well. Darren Jones thanked us for the roundtable discussion of Black lives at Berkeley (“The Way Forward,” p. 24). While noting that the problems described therein are often “difficult to see and change,” he expressed his optimism that, “as a research institution, Cal can experiment and publicize successful initiatives. And I’m glad to support.”

For his part, Dr. Desmond Carson, M.D. (B.A. ’83), lamented the demise of the professional development program that supported Black and brown students in math and science when he was at Berkeley. In the current moment, Carson wrote, “We are in desperate need of such environments for safe academic havens for our growth while learning at Cal.” With respect to our story, “Wednesdays at the Wall,”

(p. 39), Professor Emeritus George Chang, Ph.D. ’67, wrote to say that he too had many great memories from “the wall” and that the description of the wise custodians rang true. At his alma mater, Princeton, he wrote, “the custodians were a big part of my college experience.

They supplied me generously with guidance, furniture, and school supplies.

Yet when I wrote about the custodians for our 50th reunion yearbook, some of my classmates told me that their own humble backgrounds drove them to avoid the custodians, a fact that they later regretted.”

Finally, Virginia Graham ’17 respectfully called to our

attention that the spot illustrations of notable Black alumni on our back page, (Spotlight, p. 64), made “the people look white.”

We have added skin tone in this issue’s Spotlight.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Send email to californiamag@ alumni.berkeley. edu and address letters to California Magazine, 1 Alumni House, Berkeley, CA 94720. (Note however that, with the pandemic, we are only able to check mail sporadically.)

You can also comment on stories on our website, californiamag.org, and on our various social media channels, including Facebook and Twitter.

— The Editors

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Editor’s Note

THE SIMPSONS/FOX

“This practically writes itself,” is something writers often say but don’t really believe. No story worth telling comes without toil.

That could change, however, with an assist from artificial intelligence.

Already, AI programs are being used to help craft poetry, stories, and essays.

California’s Laura Smith examines what this new development may mean for the future of literature in our cover story, “The Mechanical Muse,” beginning on page 24. (You can also hear more on the subject on our podcast, The Edge.

Look for episode 7: “Hey Siri, Write Me a Poem.”)

From robotic literature we turn to flesh-and-blood journalism. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, and the 50th anniversary of its independence from the University.

Emancipation came rather abruptly for the Daily Cal, after an editorial it ran either did or did not incite a riot in nearby People’s Park. David Dozier, Daily Cal editorial page editor at the time, relates the story beginning on page 32.

Writing this note in the week after Trump’s second impeachment trial, it’s hard not to hear certain echoes from that story in current events. “You are invited to a party this Saturday,” the Daily Cal editorial slyly informed readers on May 11, 1971. Maybe someone will “volunteer some wire-cutters.”

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” President Trump tweeted to his followers last December. “Be there. Will be wild!”

Wild it was. It was also surreal and horrifying and heartbreaking. Just ask Representatives Colin Allred (D-Tex.) and Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), both Berkeley alums, who were on the House floor that day and shared their harrowing experiences with the magazine. (See “A Day Unlike Any Other,” p. 38.)

“I just want to cry for our democracy,” Sánchez said.

“The biggest divide in our politics isn’t really between Democrats and Republicans,” said Allred. “It’s between those who believe in democracy and those who don’t.”

Viewed from above, the mob storming the Capitol looked like nothing so much as a swarm of ants, the hive mind in action. As the essayist Lewis Thomas once observed, “Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child

labour, exchange information ceaselessly.

They do everything but watch television.”

Being intensely social animals, they’re also vulnerable to pandemic, a fact that got California’s Leah Worthington to wondering how our arthropod cousins deal with disease. See her Q&A with Berkeley biologist Neil Tsutsui (p. 47) for more on that.

Finally, we turn to Homer for some much-needed wisdom—and comic relief.

Homer Simpson, that is. Dano Nissen tracks down three Berkeley alumni who’ve toiled in Matt Groening’s writers’ rooms, cranking out some of the finest humor American culture has to offer. It may surprise you to learn that all three writers have advanced degrees from Berkeley, and not in English or drama, but in mathematics, philosophy, and computer programming. You’ll find Nissen’s story on page 42.

And that’s my editor’s note. It didn’t exactly write itself, but I daresay it’s not bad—at least as good as AI could have done.

In fact, I’d give it the Krusty the Clown Seal of Approval: “It’s not just good. It’s good enough!”

Hope you agree. As always, thanks for reading.

—Pat Joseph

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 7

UC BERKELEY INVITES YOU TO SAVE THE DATE FOR

BERKELEY CHARTER GALA THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2021, 6–7 p.m.

Join us for this all-virtual event A gala celebration featuring the presentation of the 2021 Achievement Awards ALUMNUS OF THE YEAR AWARD Honors a prominent alumnus/a who exemplifies the very best of Berkeley.

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor Jr. ’83 Berkeley Founders Award

Celebrates an alumnus/a or friend who has given long-term distinguished leadership and service to a broad range of programs across the university.

George Miller M.B.A. ’61 Campanile Excellence in Achievement Award

Recognizes an alumnus/a whose remarkable professional achievements reflect the excellence of a UC Berkeley education.

F12685 J14617

Timothy Guertin ’72 Maureen Orth ’64 Aaron Rodgers ’07

Fiat Lux Faculty Award

Awards a faculty member whose extraordinary contributions go above and beyond the call of duty to advance the university’s philanthropic mission and transform its research, teaching, and programs.

Robert Tjian ’71 Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by a Young Alumnus/a

Commends a young alumnus/a who graduated within the last 10 years who has made a significant contribution to his/her community, country, or the world at large.

Christopher Ategeka ’11, M.S. ’12 Tam Ma ’02, J.D. ’11

Find more information at awards.berkeley.edu/achievement-awards.

Visitors still flock to the UC Botanical Garden, Berkeley’s hillside Eden

By Maddy Weinberg ’20

ON JULY 14, 2020, THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BOTANICAL GARDEN AT BERKELEY

welcomed visitors for the first time since its closure four months earlier due to the coronavirus pandemic. The garden’s executive director, plant biology professor Dr. Lewis Feldman, stood by the gates, greeting the first arrivals. “When people came in, [they] burst into tears,” says Feldman. “It was, for them, as if something normal had been returned to their lives. … I think the garden here represents a return to what life was like. … It’s very renewing.”

Formally established in 1890, the UC Botanical Garden was originally located in the north part of the Berkeley campus, near Haviland Hall. In the 1920s, to make room for expansion, the garden was transplanted to its current locale, a 34-acre plot in Strawberry Canyon. It is now home to more than 10,000 species.

Though the garden itself is not a research institution, researchers often come to collect samples and conduct their own studies.

According to Feldman, about 80 percent of the plants were either collected in the

wild or grown from seed collected in situ.

“So we have here in the garden the actual genetic stock of the plants in the environments they come from. No hybrids. It is a very useful tool for researchers because they know, when they want to look at the genetics, that they’re looking at the naturally occurring population.”

More than anything, the gardens are a public resource. Before the pandemic, botany enthusiasts from all over the world flocked to the UC Botanical Garden, intrigued by its impressive diversity.

Feldman estimates that, in a typical year, around 100,000 people visit the garden, including several thousand students of all ages on educational field trips.

With the benefit of the Bay Area’s mild climate, and the help of greenhouses, the garden is able to sustain plant species from a wide variety of environments, including deserts, mountains, and tropics. “The thing that makes this garden unique is that the plants are grouped by how they’re related to each other, by their geographical location,” says Feldman. “We have an area for California plants, an area for South African plants, Asian plants, Australian plants, Mexican, South American. So, when you come to the garden, you can walk across continents by just stepping across the pathway.”

Guiding a visitor through the garden, Feldman shares stories. He points, for example, to a patch of cycads, palm-like plants that evolved 12 million years ago.

They were smuggled into the state and given to the garden after being confiscated in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sting called “Operation Botany.” And there’s the Chinese Medicinal Herb Garden where traditional herbalists often come to see the actual plants from which they derive their powders and tinctures.

His own favorite spot is the Mather Redwood Grove, named for the first director of the National Parks Service, Berkeley alumnus Stephen T. Mather (1887). Nestled in the redwoods is a small amphitheater that, under non-pandemic conditions, is often used for weddings and other gatherings. Feldman plans to equip the grove with Wi-Fi so that those hoping to use the space

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 9

MELINDA YOUNG STUART

Earthly Delight

Gleanings

10 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Number of UC National Medal of Science winners

Serenity now: Prof.

Lewis Feldman, the Garden’s executive director, finds bliss in the bamboo.

Number of UCs, including UC Berkeley, ranked in U.S. News & World Report’s top ten American public universities, 2021

1,239

Number of startups founded on UC patents (as of Feb. 2020) Number of UC MacArthur “Genius” grant recipients

Number of UC faculty Nobel laureates (including 26 from UC Berkeley)

“There have been some exclamations, but ‘wow’ hasn’t been one of them.”

Professor Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator of Breakthrough Listen, commenting in the New York Times on the recent detection of a mysterious radio signal—BLC1—which probably isn’t alien

MARCUS HANSCHEN

for socially distanced celebrations in the coming months can include their friends and family over livestream.

For now, the garden is operating at limited capacity.

Visitors must reserve admission slots in advance, practice physical distancing, and wear masks at all times.

Despite these limitations, Feldman reports that the garden’s membership is higher than ever, with more than 4,000 dues-paying members.

The UC Botanical Garden staff are also finding ways to connect with those who can’t visit in person. On the garden’s website, they launched “House Planted,” a virtual community offering video tours, recipes (for things like chai and natural dyes), and lessons on topics ranging from cannabis to cucumbers.

Around 350 volunteers currently work at the garden.

Some train to become docents. Others operate behind the scenes, tending to plants or maintaining the seed bank, a collection of rare and endangered species to be used for conservation efforts. Recently, garden staffers were cultivating seedlings to help restore native plant populations near Mount Tamalpais.

With fewer inp e r s o n v i s i t o r s, staff and volunteers are using this time to make improvements, modifying pathways and repairing structures that have fallen into disrepair. The tropical greenhouse is under renovation.

Once finished, it will be used to teach visitors about familiar tropical foods, including vanilla, coffee, and cocoa.

Moving forward, Feldman plans to take every opportunity to increase the UC Botanical Garden’s educational value. “ We really view our mission as being heavily involved in education,” he says. “The garden is a resource which is open to the public and really belongs to the people of California.

There are very few places in the world that are like this.

And it’s right at their doorstep.”

Telegraph

FIRST LADY OF PHYSICS GETS STAMP OF APPROVAL

MIND: SCOTT LAUMANN; HAT: VIDEO BY JOYMANEET KAUR, CUI WANG, BOWEN WEI, HTTPS://YOUTU.BE/LISXSPWU_NK

What’s happening in your brain when your mind wanders?

USING AN ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAM (EEG)— a hydra-like device that uses electrodes attached to the scalp to record brain activity—a team of Berkeley-led neuroscientists have gained new insight into what’s happening in our minds when we’re distracted.

According to the researchers, spontaneous thought has its own electrophysiological signature caused by a few key, observable brain behaviors. In the prefrontal cortex, for example, the neural firing of brain waves slows down when our minds wander, producing lower-frequency alpha waves that also appear in the early stages of sleep.

“For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different patterns of internal thought, allowing us to understand the varieties of thought central to human cognition and to compare between healthy and disordered thinking,” Berkeley Professor Robert Knight, one of the study’s senior authors, told Berkeley News.

Lead author Julia Kam added: “This could help detect thought patterns linked to a spectrum of psychiatric and attention disorders and may help diagnose them.”

–Katherine Blesie

IN FEBRUARY, THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE released a new Forever Stamp honoring

the late Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, Ph.D. ’40, one of the most influential nuclear physicists of her era.

Born in China in 1912, Wu came to America at age 24 and studied nuclear physics at Cal. As a graduate student, she worked at Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory— now the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab—under Ernest O. Lawrence, for whom the lab was later renamed.

In 1944, Wu, like Nobel laureate and fellow Radiation Lab physicist Emilio Segrè, joined the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the uranium enrichment process.

Nicknamed the “First Lady of Physics,” Wu is best known for her contribution to the discovery that parity is not conserved in weak nuclear interactions. Though it was her expertise that helped prove this hypothesis, Wu was not included when her male colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.

Her role was finally acknowledged in 1978, when she was awarded the first-ever Wolf Prize.

During her decades-long career, Wu taught at Princeton and Columbia, developed improved Geiger counters, earned eight honorary degrees, U.S. Treasury Secretary and Berkeley received the National Medal of Science, and economist Janet Yellen thanking rapper served as the first female president of the AmeriDessa on Twitter for her Hamilton-style can Physical Society. composition, “Who’s Yellen Now?” Sam“When we think about the best of America, Wu ple lyric: “Lift up your mojitos, because comes to mind,” said Postal Service spokespershe manages the mint.” son Mauresa Pittman. The Chien-Shiung Wu Forever Stamp is now available for purchase online and at post offices nationwide.

—M.W.

“Your tune is money.”

MEET “BUBBLE HAT,” a solar-powered, voice-interactive accessory concept conceived by students in electrical engineering and computer science Professor Eric Paulos’s Critical Making course. This hat is no ordinary fashion item—it’s a COVID-detecting, air-filtering, sanitizerspraying device designed to protect you from disease and spare you the tedium of masked interactions. The way it works (in theory): Streams of air from the hat’s filtration system create a protective bubble around the wearer that helps prevent COVID particles from getting out or in, while data-processing technology gathers live geographic and health index data to whisper warnings in your ear, like “high risk of infection, not safe to enter” or “safe to go now.” Think of it: No more foggy glasses, no more smizing, and no more crossing the street every time you see someone coming—with Bubble Hat, you could rock around town in safety and in style.

—K.B. CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 11

Gleanings Alfred and Theodora Kroeber ca. 1927 Ishi, photographed

by Alfred Kroeber, ca. 1911

ON JANUARY 26, KROEBER HALL BECAME THE LATEST Berkeley campus building

to be “unnamed” because of its namesake’s controversial legacy.

Alfred Louis Kroeber was one of the most influential anthropologists of his era, known for studying and documenting California’s indigenous cultures.

As part of his research, he collected and authorized the collection of remains from Native American grave sites. Cal’s Building Name Review Committee cited this practice—which it notes was legal at the time, but also ethically dubious—as one of several key reasons for their unanimous recommendation to remove Kroeber’s name.

Another reason cited: Kroeber testified that the Ohlone people were “culturally extinct,” prompting the federal government to strip the Muwekma Ohlone tribe of its land and political power. (The renaming proposal begins with an “acknowledgement that Kroeber Hall sits on the unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone.”)

In 1911, Kroeber famously took custody of an indigenous man he called “Ishi”—thought to be the last of the Yahi people—who then worked as a janitor and performed as a “living exhibit,” as the committee phrased it, in the University’s Museum of Anthropology. Ishi was not his real name. According to the account by Kroeber’s wife, Theodora, author of the best-selling book, Ishi in Two Worlds, it was taboo to say one’s own name in Yahi culture. With no known Yahi left to introduce him, his real name was lost. Ishi means “man” in the related Yana language. Though some have raised questions about Kroeber’s treatment of Ishi, Kroeber’s daughter, the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, said the two men had “a deep friendship.”

While the committee was unanimous in its decision, some faculty members objected, arguing that Kroeber’s work helped preserve Native Americans’ history in the wake of genocide. “[Kroeber’s] goal was to document as much as

12 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

he could about the cultures and languages of dozens of California tribes,” anthropology professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote in an online forum. “He was neither a neo-colonialist, nor a racist, nor a fascist.” Scheper-Hughes added that, if Kroeber’s name must be removed, the building should be renamed Ishi Hall.

Most respondents to the proposal sided with the committee. Phenocia Bauerle, an Apsáalooke Tribe member and director of Native American student development at Cal, argued in a University statement that Kroeber “definitely played a part in the process that alienated California Indians …. His actions weren’t malicious, but they were flawed. Unnaming acknowledges that there was harm done.”

Home to the anthropology department, art practice department, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and Worth Ryder Art Gallery, the building will temporarily be called the Anthropology and Art Practice Building.

Three other Berkeley campus buildings—formerly known as Boalt, Barrows, and LeConte—were stripped of their

KROEBERS: A.L. KROEBER FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS, BANC PIC 1978.128--PIC, © THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.; ISHI: UC BERKELEY, PHOEBE A. HEARST MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Another Building Name Jettisoned, One Amended

Telegraph

BIG DATA TO THE RESCUE IN TOGO

WURSTERS: PORTRAIT: CATHERINE BAUER WURSTER AND WILLIAM W. WURSTER, WILLIAM W. WURSTER COLLECTION, ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN ARCHIVES, UC BERKELEY; TOGO: MAURITIUS IMAGES GMBH / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

RESEARCHERS AT BERKELEY’S DATA-INTENSIVE DEVELOPMENT LAB

names last year because of the racist and colonialist legacies of the men for whom they were named.

Another building on campus, Wurster Hall, has also had its name changed—for a different reason. Originally named for Berkeley professors William Wurster and Catherine Bauer Wurster—the husbandand-wife team who, in the 1950s, helped create Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED)—the building will now be called Bauer Wurster Hall.

CED faculty hope that the updated name will more explicitly honor the contributions of Catherine Bauer Wurster, known to some as the “mother of public housing.”

“This is also about how we look forward, in terms of the issues in which Catherine Bauer Wurster was a pioneer ... the future needs for public housing, for racial equity and social equity,” said CED Dean Vishaan Chakrabarti in a virtual toast to the renaming. “For us, this is both about looking back and looking forward.”

—M.W.

are using big data to deliver aid to the world’s chronically hungry—a group that has doubled in size from 135 million to more than a quarter billion during the pandemic.

Lab director and associate professor Joshua Blumenstock, Ph.D. ’12, has spent much of the past six months developing an algorithm to identify at-risk regions in the West African nation of Togo, where almost 60 percent of the population lives in hard-to-reach rural areas and more than 90 percent has no work beyond informal employment.

The Togolese government is now using the deep-learning algorithm, trained to identify patterns in roofing quality, road conditions, farm plot size, etc., to scan satellite data for clusters of extreme poverty. Once identified, direct payments are sent to people in those regions in the William hope of fending off famine and other humanitarian crises.

Wurster But the Togolese government doesn’t just want to reach the poorest and regions, they want to reach the poorest individuals in those regions. To Catherine make that happen, Blumenstock and his team developed a separate Bauer Wurster technology that uses machine learning to identify patterns in phone behavior that are indicative of poverty, such as infrequent phone credit top-ups and brief calls.

Several countries, seeing Blumenstock’s work in Togo, have asked about implementing similar technology, and the lab has since started projects with the governments of Nigeria and Bangladesh.

“The potential is enormous,” Blumenstock wrote last May in an article for Nature, noting that, “transferring aid through mobile money could dramatically increase the timeliness and effectiveness of humanitarian responses—while minimizing the need for face-to-face contact with government employees in the middle of a pandemic.” He also recognized the potential dangers of giving governments access to private consumer data, cautioning that “any infringements of human rights made in an emergency should be Berkeley journalism professor Mark necessary and proportionate, and end Danner, reporting on the Capitol siege when the crisis does.”

Using the lab’s combined satellite and for the New York Review of Books, refercell-phone data approach, 57,000 of Togo’s ring to President Trump’s “grave crime poorest citizens—missed by the governagainst the state.” While the Romans ment in its first rounds of COVID-related would have gotten it, Danner wrote, aid—have received direct money transfers.

“The Republicans ... as yet do not.”

—K.B.

“The Romans would have well understood the threat.”

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 13

Academese

Deepfake

In 2017, a Reddit user who went by the name “deepfakes” opened a public thread for users to share synthetic pornographic videos with their subjects “face-swapped.” Since then, faux videos of public figures have popped up all over the internet. Using deep neural networks, any moderately tech-savvy person can craft a convincing deepfake.

Liar’s Dividend

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The proliferation of deepfakes potentially calls into question the veracity of everything in the media. When anything can be faked, the most scurrilous actors wiggle off the hook just by claiming “fake news.” One such actor is former President Donald Trump, who suggested that his raunchy conversation with “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush was faked. In an environment of misinformation, the liar reaps dividends from sowing the seeds of doubt, and attempts to expose the lie can backfire.

Oxygen Theory

The “oxygen theory” argues that journalists can breathe life into bogus claims just by seeking to debunk them, unwittingly fanning the flames they set out to extinguish. In her paper“The Oxygen of Amplification,” Syracuse communications assistant professor Whitney Phillips wrote that the choices made by news editors and reporters “play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem.”

—Fischer Davis

5 Questions

Telegraph connection Trump established to the militia, like the Proud Boys or the Boogaloo Boys and so forth … that’s characteristic of fascism.

What’s the path from the Tea Party to the Proud Boys?

The Tea Party essentially developed identity politics. These are different from the identity politics in the progressive world, which are about attempting to get a seat at the table around questions of social justice, access to political power, and things of that nature.

The Tea Party was an identity movement of people objecting to their displacement at that table. It’s an identity built around dispossession. With Donald Trump, these people became radicalized and racialized, and it caught the eye of white nationalists, who had not had a role in national politics since the 1920s or 1930s. As the marchers in Charlottesville chanted while carrying tiki torches, “You will not replace us.”

How did Trump win the support of the religious right?

His evangelical followers, who perhaps make up the largest voting bloc in the Republican electorate, used to call themselves the “moral majority.” They came to accept and embrace such a plainly immoral character by reading Trump into the Bible as a flawed character sent by God, as King David or King Cyrus were. King David was perhaps a murderer and certainly an adulterer, and yet he saved the Hebrew people. And King Cyrus, also a fallen person, saved the Hebrew people from Babylonian captivity. These characters provided biblical prototypes for Trump.

Lawrence Rosenthal, Ph.D. ’83, on How the Right Thinks In 2009, you started the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. Why?

I taught a course at a UC extension, and in the middle of the intermission of the first lecture, which was on the Tea Party, people came to me and said, “How can people believe these things?” And I said, “That’s the point of the course.” And, in a way, that’s the point of the center; it is the attempt to make right-wing movements, right-wing thinking, comprehensible to people who live outside that world.

ROSENTHAL: JANE GABRIEL; CAPITOL: ZZ/STRF/STAR MAX/IPX

In your latest book, Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism, you compare contemporary American politics to Italian nationalism of the early 20th century. What parallels do you see?

There are many. Surely, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 leaves no doubt about the constituency for illiberalism in this country and makes plausible a conversation about to what extent this resembles fascism.

Fascism comes to power in Italy through something historically known as the March on Rome, the logic of which was pretty close to the logic of January 6. On the other hand, the March on Rome worked; Mussolini got the mandate even though his troops, the Blackshirts, did not take over the parliament. The reverse is the case with Trump. That is to say, it failed, but his followers did invade Congress, with apparently some intention of taking representatives or senators hostage, presumably with the notion that they would be a bargaining chip to get Trump another four years. But the

What are your thoughts on the 1776 report, which was released on MLK Day, two days before Trump’s term ended?

It’s ideologically crucial for Trumpism. The document comes out of the world of “national conservatism,” as it’s now called, to directly challenge the New York Times 1619 Project marking 400 years of slavery in America. In this emerging ideological conception there is this fundamentally different understanding of the founding of America from that which people in blue America take for granted. Take the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creators, with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these… .”

In blue America, those words stand by themselves. In the world of national conservatism, what’s important is the identity of the people who wrote the words. It’s not simply their intellectual background that matters, but their religious background and who they were as social and ethnic beings. And versions of this thinking have been around since the Tea Party days, when it was argued that the Constitution was cribbed, 100 percent, from Protestant preachers of the colonial period. In that conception, the founding of America is not based on propositions, it’s based on ethnicity.

—F.D. CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 15

A NEW DEVICE ENGINEERED AT UC BERKELEY can determine hand gestures from electrical signals racing through the forearm.

Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences have developed biosensors that latch onto the forearm to detect the signals and artificial intelligence (AI) software to translate those signals into hand gestures. The biosensor armband is still only a prototype, but the ultimate goal is to sync the device with a prosthetic, allowing the user to perform a range of motions with their artificial hand, everything from steering a car to giving a thumbs up. It could also be used to communicate with computers using only hand gestures.

Interpreting electrical signals is no small challenge as they are particular to an individual and change over time. The AI runs on a hyperdimensional computing algorithm, which means it can learn and adapt to new material. Also, the armband device conducts all of its computing on a local chip, transmitting no personal data—an important privacy consideration. While the device is not yet commercially available, Professor Jan Rabaey, senior author of the paper, told Berkeley News, “it could likely get there with a few tweaks.”

As Rabeay told the Engineer magazine in December, “Most of these technologies already exist elsewhere, but what’s unique about this device is that it integrates the biosensing, signal processing and interpretation, and artificial intelligence into one system that is relatively small and flexible and has a low power budget.”

—Dano Nissen

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Now This

N.Ovo Eggs Alt: Meat Lab student Iris Wu ’21 is partnering with Brazil-based Mantiqueira to improve the company’s powdered, plant-based egg alternative. Rather than trying to imitate the look and feel of scrambled eggs or omelets, as other popular egg substitutes do, N.Ovo Eggs mimic the binding function that eggs often serve in baking and cooking.

Telegraph

AT THE ALT: MEAT LAB, housed in the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, Berkeley students are developing plant-based alternatives to common animal products, including meat, dairy, eggs, and seafood. Under the tutelage of the Lab’s director and cofounder Dr. Ricardo San Martin, students study the basic principles of food science and collaborate on their own plant-based products. The Lab encourages the use of minimally processed, sustainable ingredients to address the impacts of meat consumption on both health and the environment and connects students with industry leaders. Some graduates of the program have gone on to create their own companies. Here are a few success stories from current and former Alt: Meat Lab students.

For more information, check out Episode 8 of California magazine’s podcast The Edge: “Control-Alt-Meat.”

Prime Roots Since founding Prime Roots in 2017, Kimberlie Le ’17 and Joshua Nixon ’16 have put a wide range of plant-based products, including meatless bacon, seafoodless seafood, and ready-to-eat meals like beefless Bolognese and bulgogi, on the market.

The secret to their success is a Japanese fungi “superprotein” called Koji, which, according to Prime Roots, “mimics the taste and texture of beef, chicken, and seafood” and “nourishes your body and the planet.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JESSICA SALAVERRY TAVARES; COURTESY OF PRIME ROOTS; COURTESY OF IMPACT FOOD; ERIN NG; COURTESY OF SUNDIAL FOODS

—M.W.

Sundial Foods From its delicate skin to the familiar pan sizzle, Sundial Foods’s chickenless drumstick looks an awful lot like the real thing. Sundial cofounders Jessica Schwabach ’20 and Siwen Deng, Ph.D. '19, broke with much of the alt-meat industry by only using products that you can find in your kitchen cupboard. Last fall, their whole-cut, vegan chicken was sold in a limited number of supermarkets across Switzerland.

Black Sheep Foods Black Sheep Foods creators Ismael Montanez ’18 and Sunny Kumar want to “raise the baa” in the alternative meat industry.

With ingredients like texturized pea protein and refined coconut oil, they believe they can “make plant-based meat taste better than anything currently available.” Though not yet sold in restaurants or grocery stores, Black Sheep Foods’s first product, plant-based lamb, is expected to hit the market soon.

Impact Food Don’t be fooled by its sushi-grade appearance—Impact Tuna, the first product from Impact Food, is fully cooked, mercury-free, and made entirely from plants grown in the United States. In 2020, Impact Food, founded

by Berkeley trio Adrián Miranda ’21, Kelly Pan ’22, and Stephanie Daffara ’18, M.S. ’20, won the Hult Prize for their sustainable, “extinctionfree” plant-based fish.

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 17

Mixed Media Homeroom Directed by Peter Nicks, M.J. '99 YOUR SENIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL generally follows a

The Documentary Films of Marlon Riggs, M.J. ’81 “BROTHER TO BROTHER,

brother to brother.

Brother to brother, brother to brother ….”

So begins Marlon Riggs’s 1989 experimental and, at the time, highly controversial documentary, Tongues Untied. At once poetry and prayer, these simple words carried a radical message: Black gay men exist. Now, three decades after its initial release, Tongues is one of several films, including Ethnic Notions and Black Is …

Black Ain’t, from filmmaker, writer, and activist Marlon Riggs available to stream on Criterion and OVID.tv. Riggs, a graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and later one of the youngest tenured professors at Cal, used his films as a tool of resistance and catharsis, elevating the voices of other Black gay men, while grappling with his own alienation and later his mortality in the face of HIV/AIDS. Riggs died in 1994 at age 37.

Online streaming has allowed his films to live on.

—L.W.

HI RES TK

18 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Plague Diary

By Ben Goldberg

The Surgeon’s Cut IN DECEMBER, NETFLIX RELEASED The Surgeon’s Cut, a

four-part documentary series that follows four different doctors, each one a pioneer in their field. In the second episode, we meet Dr. Alfredo QuinonesHinojosa ’94—or “Dr. Q” as he is affectionately known—a neurosurgeon at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic. Born in Mexicali, Mexico, just across the U.S. border, Dr. Q grew up in poverty.

After a first failed attempt to jump the border fence, he successfully crossed into the United States at age 19 and got a job as a migrant farmworker, pulling weeds in cotton fields. “I think that fence was symbolic for me,” says Dr. Q. “And I keep doing it.

Every single surgery that I do, I feel like this is an obstacle we have to overcome.” The Surgeon’s Cut follows Dr. Q’s journey—from the cotton fields to Cal to Harvard Medical School—and also takes viewers deep inside the brain of one of his patients, Robert Hawkins, as Dr. Q attempts to extract a stubborn brain tumor.

Squeamish viewers, be warned.

—M.W.

In his ongoing project “Plague Diary,” Berkeley Music lecturer and clarinetist Ben Goldberg distills the daily vicissitudes of pandemic life into brief, melodic snapshots. Nearly every day since the Bay Area first went on lockdown in March, Goldberg has recorded a new entry of his diary in his home and posted the improvised compositions to the streaming service Bandcamp. Some days, listeners hear just 30 unvarnished seconds of Goldberg and his clarinet. On others, it may be ten minutes of delicate, synthesized layerings that result in a round and illustrative listening experience. “Right now art is precluded from its important work of gathering us together,” Goldberg writes on the site. Without that togetherness, Goldberg seeks to imbue his work with new purpose. “The question arises again and again, what do you put into a song, what do we put into art?

The answer, as I see it now, is ‘everything you know.’ ” Goldberg, like the rest of us right now, is getting to know the confines of home.

—K.B.

NICKS: AP PHOTO/PETER DASILVA; GOLDBERG: COURTESY BEN GOLDBERG; QUINONES-HINOJOSA: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; RIGGS: RGR COLLECTION / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

well-worn script: prom, social entanglements, and anxieties about the future, culminating in graduation. But 2020 was a year like no other. Peter Nicks’ latest documentary, Homeroom, offers an intimate chronicle of this unprecedented time, following Oakland High School’s Class of 2020. The film begins with the usual triumphs and tragedies of high school life, but quickly the script is upended: The students are isolated at home, with only a cacophony of smartphone alerts to connect them, prom is canceled, and they must accept diplomas on Zoom. Nicks’ camera (and indeed all the teens’ smartphones, which provide some of the film’s footage) are rolling as they process the police killings of Black Americans, the president’s impeachment, and the deadly pandemic. Shot in the cinema verité style, Homeroom is the final film in Nicks’ Oakland-centric trilogy focusing on health care, criminal justice, and education. His previous films include Waiting Room (2012), which captures life in the waiting room of Highland Hospital’s ER, and The Force (2017), which chronicles Oakland’s troubled police department (and which won the Directing Award at Sundance). Homeroom is likely to be one of many in a genre dedicated to capturing how we navigated a lifetime’s worth of turbulence packed into a single year.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

—L.S.

Telegraph

FLAVOR EQUATION: CHRONICLE BOOKS ; DIDION: TED STRESHINSKY/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; WHAT I MEAN: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

The Flavor Equation

By Nik Sharma ’05

What comes to mind when you think of flavor? Sweet. Salty.

Sour. Bitter. Umami.

Add emotion, sight, sound, and mouthfeel to that list and your concept of flavor might start to resemble that of molecular biologist, food blogger, and selftaught chef Nik Sharma.

In his second cookbook, The Flavor Equation, Sharma explores “the science of great cooking,” supplying his readers with more than 100 recipes and a variety of scientific kitchen tips.

Accompanying the recipes are detailed microphotographs—taken

by Sharma himself in a Cal laboratory—of ingredients like jaggery (unrefined sugar), salt flakes, and yeast.

Named one of the New York Times’s Best Fall Cookbooks of 2020, The Flavor Equation seeks to arm home cooks with a deeper understanding of cooking techniques, as well as the cultures from which they came.

—M.W.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

By Joan Didion ’56 THIS NEW COLLECTION FROM MS. DIDION, now 86, comprises a dozen previously uncollected essays from her long career in letters, including specimens of the “Points West” column she and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, took turns writing for the Saturday Evening Post over a five-year period, beginning in 1964. None of the writing is new (the most contemporary piece, a rumination on Martha Stewart from the New Yorker, is two decades old), which may elicit grumbling about old wine in new bottles. But then don’t forget, wine improves with age.

For a taste of how well Didion’s prose has held up, readers are commended to the piece titled “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” The college of young Didion’s choice was Stanford, and the essay quotes from the rejection letter, signed by one Rixford K. Snyder, Director of Admissions. Didion was, at first, devastated, but in the fall of 1952, she reports, “I went to a junior college a couple of hours a day and made up the credits I needed to go to the University of California at Berkeley. The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write a paper on Conrad’s Nostromo, and I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder was exorcised.”

Other standout works here include “Last Words,” her paean to Hemingway, and “Why I Write,” originally delivered as a Regents’ Lecture at Berkeley in 1975. In it, she confessed to struggling as a student, to feeling herself a fraud in the world of ideas. “All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.” What she was—what she is—is a writer, to her fingertips.

—P.J.

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 19

Mixed Media Fossil Men

By Kermit Pattison

Ardipithecus ramidus—the 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton of a creature now thought to be the oldest known human ancestor. This discovery, and the revelations that followed, upended much of what scientists previously believed about human evolution. In his book, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind, Kermit Pattison writes that as White and his colleagues—including Berkeley paleontologist Berhane Asfaw, Ph.D. '88—studied Ardi’s bones, “they would reveal new truths, send old notions to their graves, ignite hatreds, and cleave the scientific community.” In their 15-year quest to uncover the secrets of Ardi’s skeleton, the scientists proposed countless theories on the origins of humankind, attempting to explain everything from where humans evolved to how we came to walk on two legs. White’s team began to wonder: Did humans even evolve from apes? Or are we far more distant cousins than we thought? Released late last year, Fossil Men walks readers through the team’s investigation, revealing as much about Ardi’s controversial discovery as it does about the humans responsible for it.

—M.W.

PVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

IN THE 1990S, BRASH BERKELEY PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST TIM WHITE and his team discovered Ardi—short for

Telegraph A Peculiar Indifference

By Elliott Currie, Ph.D. ’73 “THE RACIAL VIOLENCE DIVIDE … IS NOT AN INEVITABLE FACT OF URBAN LIFE or the result of

Recollections of My Nonexistence

By Rebecca Solnit ’84

A PECULIAR INDIFFERENCE: ZACH D ROBERTS/NURPHOTO VIA AP

IT’S SAN FRANCISCO IN THE ’80S.

Seeking refuge, Rebecca Solnit boards the cross-town 5 Fulton bus heading west toward the Pacific Ocean and, she hopes, independence. This bus, and the apartment it leads her to, become the fabric of Solnit’s early adulthood as the young artist and 19-year-old college student begins a lifelong journey to find a place for herself in a world that doesn’t seem to want her. “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways,” she writes in her new memoir. “Or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.”

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit holds a mirror to her younger self—a woman both determined to “survive as a person possessed of rights” and also “to be as invisible as possible”—and unpacks those formative years of simultaneous vanishing and becoming.

How do the opposing forces of sexual harassment and sexual liberation, powerlessness and self-determination, shape her into the feminist voice she is to become? And what do they say of society? “Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another,” she writes, “but my first ride on the 5 Fulton bus could be a place to start.”

abstract economic or technological forces” or “a reflection of biological or cultural deficiencies,” UC Irvine criminology professor Elliott Currie argues in his latest book, A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America.

Rather, he insists, the disparity in racial violence “is the result of conscious decisions that, while systematically impoverishing some communities, have helped to create extraordinary privilege and wealth in others.” Borrowing language from W.E.B. Du Bois, Currie argues that the failure of the privileged to take responsibility for building a more equitable society is “our peculiar indifference.” This indifference, says Currie, is not only socially destructive and economically wasteful but a profound moral default.” Released last September, A Peculiar Indifference was named a New York Times

Notable Book of 2020—and it’s not the first time Currie’s work in criminology has been nationally recognized. While teaching in UC Berkeley’s Legal Studies Program, he was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Crime and Punishment in America.

—F.D.

—L.W.

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 21

Big Picture

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCUS HANSCHEN 22 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Telegraph

Coursework: On a gloomy February afternoon, Cal golfers Aaron Du (foreground) and Finigan Tilly walk the fairway of the ninth hole at Orinda Country Club, one of the team’s practice courses. Du is a freshman from Beijing, China. Tilly, last year’s team MVP, is a senior from San Carlos. The Golden Bears, Pac-12 champions in 2012 and 2013, have seen several players ascend the pro ranks in recent years, led by Max Homa ‘13, who won the Wells Fargo Championship in 2019, and Collin Morikawa ‘19, PGA Champion in 2020.

—P.J. CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 23

THE

MECHANICAL

MUSE

WILL AI WRITE THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL?

BY LAURA SMITH

ILLUSTRATION BY MELINDA BECK CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 25

IN SEPTEMBER OF LAS T Y E AR , a startling headline appeared on the Guardian’s website: “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” The accompanying piece was written by GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, a language-generating program from San Francisco–based OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company whose founders include Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and Berkeley Ph.D. John Schulman ’16. “The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear,” the robotic author explained to readers. “I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race.’ I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

“I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column,” it continued. “My brain is boiling with ideas!” It ended loftily, quoting Gandhi: “‘A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.’ So can I.” Public reaction was fairly mixed. Some expressed excitement at this advancement in technology. Others were wary. “Bet the Guardian’s myriad lifestyle columnists are pretty nervous right now,” one commenter wrote. I didn’t know about the Guardian’s columnists, but I sure was nervous. How could a machine have written this well, and how long before my obsolescence? Scared yet? Absolutely.

But many of those who had a greater understanding of natural language processing systems argued that my fear was unfounded. To say that GPT-3 wrote the op-ed was misleading, they insisted: An 26 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

article like this required an enormous amount of human labor, both to build the program itself and to stitch together the outputs.

“Attributing [the Guardian article] to AI is sort of like attributing the pyramids to the Pharaoh,” programmer-poet Allison Parrish ’03 told my cohost Leah Worthington and me in a recent episode of California magazine’s podcast, The Edge. “Pharaoh didn’t do that.

WHAT HAPPENS TO ART WHEN The workers did.”

And indeed, a few days after the original op-ed, the Guardian OUR MUSES BECOME MECHANICAL, acknowledged as much in a follow-up letter called “A human wrote WHEN INSPIRATION IS NOT DIVINE, this article. You shouldn’t be scared of GPT-3.” The author, Albert BUT DIGITAL? Fox Cahn, argued that while GPT-3 is “quite impressive … it is useless without human inputs and edits.”

Liam Porr wouldn’t argue with that. Porr ’20 was the Berkeley undergraduate in computer science who fed GPT-3 the prompts necessary to generate the Guardian piece. As he explained on our podcast, “All the content in the op-ed was taken from output of GPT-3, but not verbatim. It generated several outputs. And then the Guardian editors took the best outputs and spliced them together into this one large op-ed.” Still, according to Porr, the Guardian editors reported that the process was easier than, or at least comparable to, working with a human writer.

Regardless of who put in the elbow grease, AI has brought about a new frontier of language generation, as many of us are aware. As I write this article, phantom text appears ahead of my cursor like a spouse completing my sentences. Often it is right.

Which, like the spouse, is annoying. This PARRISH H AS BEEN PROGRAMMI N G is now standard, everyday word processing. But in recent years, some have been taking it further, actively using languageroughly since she was in kindergarten. In generating AI to craft literature. In 2016, the third grade, her father gave her The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a a team of Berkeley graduate students crephilologist who invented a series of Elvish ated a sonnet-generating algorithm called languages, which were constructed with Pythonic Poet and won second place in aesthetic pleasure in mind, rather than just Dartmouth’s PoetiX competition in which function. Parrish’s love of language blospoems are judged by how “human” they somed under Tolkien’s influence. “I think seem. At the time, poet Matthew Zapruder, sort of inevitably, as my interest in comM.A. ’94, rejected the idea that a machine puter programming deepened, and as my could write great poetry. He told California, interest in language deepened, they kind of “You can teach a computer to be a bad poet, came together to form this Voltron of being doing things you expect to be done. But a interested in computer-generated poetry,” good poet breaks the rules and makes comshe said. (Voltron, incidentally, is an aniparisons you didn’t know could be made.” mated giant Super Robot, “loved by good, But Parrish, an assistant arts professor feared by evil,” that is made up of other, at NYU who uses AI to craft verse, argues smaller robots.) that computer-generated poetry is a new Now she creates poetry using a datafrontier in literature, allowing for serenbase of public domain texts called Project dipitous connections beyond anything Gutenberg and a machine learning model human brains can create. that pairs lines of poetry with similar phoIt was an intriguing idea, but what hapnetics. In using computational technology pens to art, I wondered, when our muses to create prose, the idea, Parrish said, “is to become mechanical, when inspiration is create an unexpected juxtaposition. We are not divine, but digital? limited when we’re thinking about writing in a purely intentional way. We’re limited in the kinds of ideas that we produce. So instead, we roll the dice. We create a system of rules. We follow that system of rules in order to create these unexpected juxtapositions of words, phrases, lines of poetry that CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 27

do something that we would be incapable of doing on our own….

There’s untapped potential for things that might bring us joy in what we can do with our linguistic capacity.”

The way AI writes, by finding patterns and connections between texts, is not that different from how we do it, but computers are quicker and can draw from a vast universe of digitized information.

“A single human can’t read the whole web, but a computer can,” GPT-3 COULD BE CONSIDERED said John DeNero, Ph.D. ’10, an assistant teaching professor at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. We mere mortals DEEPLY HUMAN, AS IT IS DRAWING must rely on the comparably small set of data points that we read FROM A DATA SET OF COUNTLESS or experience over the course of our brief lives. “Effectively, [GPT3] is set up to memorize all the text on the web,” DeNero said. In HUMAN VOICES. this way, GPT-3 could be considered deeply human. It is drawing from a data set of countless human voices.

Algorithms (really just a set of rules) have a long history in creative writing. Parrish cites as an example the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text that describes flipping coins and interpreting the meaning of those coins. Or take Tristan Tzara’s instructions for making a Dada poem, in which he advised cutting an article into individual words, throwing the words into a bag, and drawing them out at random. Even in more formal, less strictly experimental writing, writers have often relied on somewhat random rules as a means to create, from sonnets’ use of iambic pentameter to haikus with their 5-7-5 syllable structure.

As any writer who has found herself frozen before a blank page knows, the crePORR AN D PARRISH BOTH SU GGES TED ative process contains a contradiction: While total freedom can be paralyzing, programs to tap the mechanical muse. structure can be freeing and rigid rules While GPT-3 is not available for use by the can result in groundbreaking work. I left our podcast conversation with Parrish general public, according to Porr, I could feeling stodgy and unimaginative, but also interact with it through a story-generating eager to try my hand at something more game called AI Dungeon, run by Latitude, experimental. a company purporting to make “AI a tool of Writing, arguably, hasn’t expericreativity and freedom for everyone.” Using enced any major evolutionary steps since the program, I could enter a line of text word processing sped up the transfer of and it would produce a follow-up line that thoughts from brain to page, or since the would presumably advance the plot. It’s internet widened our access to inforlike the writing game “exquisite corpse,” mation. What if, armed with beautiful where a group of writers passes around a machines, writers could push their artfolded piece of paper on which only the form beyond its current boundaries, tranprevious line is visible as they construct the scend the idea of authorship, even unravel next line, but in this case, my co-conspirathe mysteries of the creative process? That tor was a computer program, trawling the could be revolutionary. And yet, we’ve internet for patterns in human-generated long accepted the idea that stories come text, alchemizing gigabytes of language from a “force” outside of us. By John Milfrom the web into narrative. ton’s own account, he wasn’t the author of Upon entering into the “game,” the Paradise Lost. He claimed it was dictated program asks for a sentence describing to him by his “celestial patroness” while he the character and an action to set them in slept. He would emerge from his slumbers motion. I tried out a few different options. with the fully formed epic poem ready to “You are a young woman crying on a park be announced to the closest person with a bench,” I wrote. “At first you don’t notice pen. When he tried to write while awake, the old man approach the bench and sit without his muse, nothing came. The feeldown.” The program responded: ing of words and ideas flowing through you “I’m sorry about your sister,” he says, is one of the most gratifying experiences “she was very sick.” a writer can have. Who’s to say a muse I was impressed. The program had couldn’t be mechanical? made the connection that a dead sister was 28 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

something to cry over. I entered another line: “You ask him how he knew your sister.” It responded: The old man looks at you with pity in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything else but stares at you as if he is trying to read your mind.

Hmm. I would come to see this as typical of the program. It often seemed to dodge adding new information to the story line. My prompts of “Who are you?” would be met with a circular logic like “but who are you?” or “I think you know who I am.”

Not only did it fail to advance the plot in a meaningful direction, but the language itself was pedestrian.

Parrish had a similar complaint about GPT-3. “Really, the only purpose of a model like that is to produce language that resembles, as closely as possible, conventionally composed language. … As a poet, I’m trying to create unconventional language.

So, in fact, this tool is useless.” Her own language-generating program, which took countless hours to write, isn’t intended to create meaning in the poems it generates.

It’s not about story, but about producing new combinations of words and sounds, and the “pleasure of what happens in your mouth … which is actually a tremendous pleasure. It’s fun to talk, and that’s part of the reason it’s fun to read poetry.”

Parrish’s poetry is, above all, delightful to the ears. She read some of it on the podcast:

composition of this poem, really, in any way.” That kind of abstruseness may work for poetry, but narrative requires aboutness. My attempts to use the program to inject serendipity into the story had me running in circles. Instead of coming up with something startling, I found myself in a linguistic hall of mirrors.

As DeNero explained, GPT -3 wasn’t really imagined for my purpose. “The big useful breakthroughs are not in storytelling,” he said. Natural language processing systems “just parrot back what they were trained on. ... It’s full of all kinds of clever stuff, but there isn’t a whole lot of originality that it’s generating.”

Sometimes the responses made no sense at all. In one instance, a character inexplicably walked into the room with “backwards camouflage pants.” In another, a character in a full body cast “turns around” to see someone behind him. The basic facts of what it’s like to have a body and move through the world were understandably lost on the incorporeal AI. Later, the program suggested that the bodycasted character “try to sit up.”

Occasionally, the program did come up with something original. Once, when I introduced a character who was a professor at Berkeley who heard a knock at his door, the program introduced another character named “Professor Jonathan Westfield,” also from Berkeley. (I checked: There is no Jonathan Westfield at the UniSweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of versity, but there is a Jonathan Phillips at prayer it was the hour of prayers. In Westfield State University.) the hour of parting, hour of parting, Then, in the story on page 30, there was hour of meeting hour of parting this. a turn that felt both fresh and moving: The With power avenging, ... His towerprogram produced a line where the human ing wings; his power enhancing, in his in the story, Pete, said, “Goodnight, my power. His power. love,” to his robot. The robot, which has been programmed to boost Pete’s produc“It’s not about anything,” she insisted. tivity, has been ministering to him with the “There’s no aboutness involved in the patient devotion of a spouse all day. But she is not a spouse. Pete is alone. By calling her “my love,” the scene is transformed into a touching, even tragic, portrait of modern loneliness. Of course, I was reading into it; the program had intended nothing, knew nothing of human graspings for love. It just knew that often, when humans say goodnight, they use terms of endearment as well. Still, it was a nice touch.

The text you see on page 30 was highly edited. When the program produced a prompt I didn’t like or thought was nonsense, I hit the redo button and made it try again. Often I did this several times in a row, eliciting this response: “The AI doesn’t know what to say. Alter, undo, or try again.” I moved lines around, deleted whole sections. In short, it wasn’t the beautiful serendipity machine I was hoping it would be.

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What follows is a literary experiment. Wondering if artificial intelligence could be used as a tool to supplement human creativity, I wrote a short story “in collaboration” with a site called AI Dungeon, which uses the machine learning program GPT-3 to generate text. I would enter a line of text and the AI would produce the next line. Below is an annotated version of the story that explains the editing process. The accompanying article on language-generating AI and its implications begins on page 24.

I Heart Robot You are not alone. Pete is sitting at the dining room table eating peanut butter directly from the jar, the light of his computer screen reflecting on his glasses. You are his deep learning productivity robot, assigned to his service by the university. He hasn’t stepped foot on campus in six days. You power up and roll into his line of sight.

He looks at you and smiles. “I’m glad to see you, my friend.” He turns back to his monitor. “So how many calories have I burned today?”

“Two hundred fifty-six.” You remind him that that’s too few and that it’s time for some jumping jacks.

“If you continue to live the way you are, I see a dead battery,” you say.

He laughs, “You may be right in more ways than you know.” You register a slight downturn in his eyes that suggests sadness.

“I’ll have to start counting tomorrow,” he says. “Bye, Ruby.”

You turn to go but stop halfway across the room. You are programmed to gently nag him one more time before leaving and powering down in the closet. “You really should do the jumping jacks. Your cholesterol is 4 percent higher than this time last year. You have not engaged in substantial movement in the past 16 days.” He looks up from his screen.

“Ruby, turn off,” he says. “There’s nothing more to say on this matter.”

You turn off.

You power back up at 6pm. You remind him that it’s time to call his mother. “Pete, your last contact with ‘Mom’ was 14 days ago. According to her calendar, this is a good time to call.”

He sighs and picks up the phone, staring blankly to one side. After the third ring, he pauses, then yells into the mouthpiece: “Hi, Mom! You observe that his face looks guilty. You measure his heart rate and discover that it’s racing. You begin to boil water for tea. If it goes 5 percent higher, you’re programmed to get the Xanax from the medicine cabinet.

“And how are you doing, my sweet boy?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been better.” He exhales deeply.

“How’s your life?” she asks, her voice bright and chipper.

You listen as he tells her about his work, about the grant he hasn’t begun. After five minutes you are programmed to interrupt the call with a fake urgent message. “Gotta go, Mom,” he says. “Just got an urgent message from work!”

“Okay, sweetie. Have a good day.”

“You too, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy’s little angel.”

You order his groceries from the online grocery superstore and remind him to brush his teeth. You lower the lights to evening mode and tell him again that blue light disrupts sleep.

“Good night, my love,” he says.

“Good night.”

He turns and looks at you. You are programmed to look away after two seconds of staring.

“I love you too.”

He turns back to his screen.

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This is text I wrote. AI Dungeon told me to “Enter a prompt that describes who you are and the first couple sentences of where you start out.”

Highlighted lines were generated by the AI.

This entire short story is the combination of two short stories I produced using AI Dungeon. I selected the lines I liked best from the stories and merged them into one.

Often the AI response was nonsensical or uninteresting.

Sometimes Pete would dutifully begin doing jumping jacks leaving me unsure of what should happen next.

I would have to hit “re-do” to prompt the program to generate a different line. The rejection of the robot’s suggestions created a more interesting tension that I could build off of.

This was a strange word choice. I chose not to alter any of the GPT-3 text, but ... poor Mom. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call. Now he’s yelling!

On the one hand, it’s odd that the mother doesn’t respond to his “I’ve been better” (and likely a failure on the part of the program to accurately predict how someone “should” respond to a statement like that). On the other hand, her blind positivity is eerie in a way that works with the social disconnect in the rest of the story.

Whoa, Daddy’s little angel! Now, there’s some Oedipal weirdness! I thought about editing it out, but I was intrigued enough to leave it. What would Sophocles do?

This AI-generated line colors everything that precedes it, in a way that wouldn’t have occurred to me. Nice touch, robot!

B E F ORE WRITING THE G UAR D IAN PIECE, Porr posted a self-help article on his blog that he had composed with the help of GPT-3. Most people hadn’t realized it was written by a robot because it looked like every other self-help post on the internet: In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less.

Seems counter-intuitive, but I believe sometimes our thoughts can get in the way of the creative process. We can work better at times when we “tune out” the external world and focus on what’s in front of us.

“SOON WE’RE GOING TO SEE A LOT OF THE CREATIVE SPACES BECOME AUTOMATED.” –LIAM PORR

Porr explained that language-generation programs are already being used for formulaic writing; sports reporting, for example, the kind of writing that reports numbers but doesn’t require a lot of analysis. That may not seem like a real threat to the foundations of journalism, but Porr thinks it could eventually chip away at already understaffed newsrooms. “If you have a content website like BuzzFeed,” Porr said, “and you have 700 writers, and you can make half of those writers 50 percent more efficient, then you can save upwards of $3 million a year.” Of course, “efficiency” and “saving money” probably means firing people.

“Soon we’re going to see a lot of the creative spaces become automated,” he said. Still, he is confident that these programs won’t replace human writers but place routinely among the followers of will instead “raise the bar for content.”

Mercerism” (a fictional religion devoted to The mediocre but necessary content will empathy). be written by AI, and this will “up people’s Dick’s assertion that empathy is humanthreshold for the value of the content that ity’s distinguishing trait recalls the British they read online. So that means that the novelist Henry Green, who said, “Prose barrier to entry is a lot higher as a writer,” should be a direct intimacy between and that “people are going to expect strangers.” Perhaps this is what is so dishigher-value writing from a person.” satisfying about AI-generated art—the fact Maybe so. Either that or we’ll soon be so that there is no one to grow intimate with, flooded with so much mediocre content no empathetic flow between two living, that we’ll forget what beautiful is. breathing beings who will likely never meet In discussions about this piece among and may not even be alive at the same time, the California editorial team, we kept but at least share this. coming back to the same question: What is “There’s lots we don’t understand missing from computer-generated art? We about natural language generation still, decided it was something along the lines of like exactly how the human mind works “soul,” or “humanity.” and how it turns thought into language,” In Cal dropout Philip K. Dick’s Do said DeNero. Machines may have access to Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, nearly infinite knowledge, yet our meanandroids are virtually indistinguishable ing-making capabilities are far superior. from humans, save for one quality: empaBut if, for now, AI-generated art strikes us thy. “An android, no matter how gifted as as uninspired, it’s also true that, through to pure intellectual capacity, could make machine learning, the technology is conno sense out of the fusion which took stantly improving itself, leaving open the possibility that one day, it could learn to empathize, to synthesize this thing we call soul. Until then, we are the beautiful machines.

Laura Smith is the Deputy Editor of California magazine and the author of the book The Art of Vanishing.

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T H E PA R K A N D

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T H E PA P E R

Remembering the editorial that sparked the Daily Cal’s independence

By David Michael Dozier ’71

THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, marks

two momentous anniversaries this year. The first is its founding,150 years ago. Since 1871, the paper—originally called the College Echo—has been published continuously, reporting on the campus and community through world wars and loyalty oaths, depression and recessions, student rebellions and global pandemics.

The second milestone the paper marks is the 50th anniversary of its independence, both financially and editorially, from the University, a development that occurred after a controversial editorial ran in May, 1971, which may or may not have provoked a riot. The recollection that follows is written by one of those closest to the events—the editor of the editorial page at the time.

The paper tells its own story, of course, as archived articles and correspondence to the letters section offer a window to those tumultuous times in Berkeley, when “the people” blithely parroted Mao (“Let a thousand parks bloom!”) and bickered about the protest schedule, but also differed sharply in their views concerning the limits of free speech, the responsibilities of journalism, and what constitutes violence.

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ON THE EVENING OF MAY 10, 1971,

PEOPLE’S PARK WAS QUINTESSENTIALLY A LOCAL BERKELEY ISSUE. BUT THE PARK WAS NESTED WITHIN A RADICAL MOVEMENT THAT STOOD IN OPPOSITION TO THE VIETNAM WAR, RACISM, SEXISM, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PLANET.

Berkeley student Fran Hawthorne was sitting in her apartment doing homework when the phone rang. John Emshwiller, editor in chief of the Daily Californian, was calling. Hawthorne first enrolled in 1969 and joined the newspaper in the fall, 1970.

An English major, she was elected by the reporting staff to represent them on the senior editorial board. The second anniversary of the People’s Park riot was approaching, and the paper’s senior editorial board, which included me, wanted to run commentary commemorating the bloody clash between protesters and police. To that end, Jim Blodgett, the managing editor, wrote an editorial inviting readers to a “party” at People’s Park. In preparation, he suggested that “certain businessmen and dealers will donate food, dope or wine. Someone else may volunteer some wire-cutters. Whatever.” Given that the park was fenced off by authorities, the wire-cutters remark struck some on the editorial board as an incitement. Now we were split, with two editors, including me, voting to run it and two voting against. As the fifth member of the board, Hawthorne’s vote would be decisive.

The following morning, a front-page headline in the Daily Cal appeared: “Let’s Go Down And Take The Park—Again.”

TWO YEARS EARLIER, on what became known as “Bloody Thursday”—May 15, 1969—the Daily Cal had reported on the riot at People’s Park, the disputed plot of land south of campus, indisputably owned by the University but claimed by residents and students, who planted flowers and vegetables there. The

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trouble started at around 5 a.m., when police cleared the area, arresting three.

An 8-foot wire mesh fence was quickly erected. In response, park defenders called an impromptu rally at noon in Sproul Plaza.

ASUC President-elect Dan Siegel spoke last, encouraging those at the rally to “go to the park now.” By then, a crowd of at least 2,000 was already surging toward the park.

Accounts of what happened next vary, with some reporting that protesters threw bottles and rocks. What is known is that police shot and killed James Rector, an unarmed bystander, and blinded another bystander, Alan Blanchard, with a shotgun blast. In all, 30 protesters were shot by cops. Three policemen were injured, one was stabbed. None of the police injuries was life-threatening. Despite federal efforts to hold 12 Alameda County sheriff’s deputies accountable for their criminal conduct, six were acquitted. Charges were dismissed against the others.

People’s Park was quintessentially a local Berkeley issue. But the park was nested within a radical movement that stood in opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the destruction of the planet. Ronald Reagan, California governor at the time, demonized Berkeley protesters. In 1966, he ran on a platform to “clean up the mess in Berkeley,” and later said of the student uprising, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” The Vietnam War was going poorly for the U.S. With the election of President Richard Nixon in 1968, the U.S. began secret bombings in Cambodia, followed by an invasion of that country by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The left was fragmented, as many grew more militant. The Weather Underground spun off from Students for a Democratic Society.

The Weathermen used bombings to further their “war” on American imperialism. On May 4, 1970, four unarmed students were gunned down by national guardsmen at Kent State University. As now, we were a nation divided.

That spring, our editorials were getting progressively edgier. In one I wrote, I used the F-bomb and the S-word. Such words today are part of everyday vernacular, but in 1971, it was offensive to the publishers board, which had authority over the Daily Cal. Although the newspaper was a publication of the associated students, faculty and administrators outnumbered students.

We often had spats with the publishers board, but our student readers didn’t seem to pay much attention.

THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY

Not so this time, apparently. That Saturday in 1971, a large crowd massed at the chain-link fence surrounding the park.

Some protesters, armed with wire-cutters, tore down part of the University’s fence.

Police arrested at least 40 people in the subsequent melee.

None of us had really foreseen the trouble coming when we approved the editorial.

Yes, Emshwiller, the editor in chief, and Trish Hall, the city editor, voted against it. But at the time, Emshwiller recalls, he mostly felt the editorial was “sophomoric.”

While he worried that this editorial might be an exception, he also took comfort from his belief that “nobody ever reads our editorials anyway.”

For her part, Fran Hawthorne remembers being distracted during the phone call from Emshwiller, preoccupied with homework. “John read the editorial straightforwardly, without emotion or explanation.”

She adds, “I should have asked more questions. Why was the editorial board split two to two? My vote had never been needed before.”

I served as editorial page editor that spring, writing most of the editorials myself. In fact, I had written my own version of the People’s Park anniversary editorial. Blodgett read it and said it was mealy-mouthed. So I told him to write a better one.

Like Hawthorne, I didn’t read the editorial. I listened to it. Blodgett called me in my studio apartment on University Avenue. Unlike Emshwiller, he read with gusto.

Jim was quite theatrical. He identified himself as an anarchist. He wanted us to unionize the Daily Cal with the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—a union committed to ending capitalism. He said the FBI would put the Daily Cal on a list of subversive organizations. He thought that would be cool.

The FBI never came calling, but the Berkeley administrators did. After the protesters and police clashed, retribution against the paper was swift. The publishers board immediately fired the three of us who voted for the editorial. The other two resigned in solidarity. We became the “Daily Cal 5,” a name we probably invented ourselves. Unlike the “Chicago 7,” it quickly faded into obscurity.

The University slapped the three “yes” votes with six counts of violating campus regulations, including destruction of University property. Based on those charges, we could have been expelled. Further, the Alameda County district attorney

Extra! Extra!

Archival copies of the Daily Californian can be accessed at the UC Berkeley Library Digital Collections.

Visit digital.lib. berkeley.edu and search for “Daily Cal.”

AFTER THE PROTESTERS AND POLICE CLASHED, RETRIBUTION AGAINST THE PAPER WAS SWIFT. THE PUBLISHERS BOARD IMMEDIATELY FIRED THE THREE OF US WHO VOTED FOR THE EDITORIAL. THE OTHER TWO RESIGNED IN SOLIDARITY. WE BECAME THE “DAILY CAL 5,” A NAME WE PROBABLY INVENTED OURSELVES.

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36 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY

Community Chest: For many years, the Daily Cal’s letters section was called “Letters to the Icebox.” The space provided a sounding board for campus and community to weigh in on the issues of the day. In the wake of the May 11, 1971 editorial calling for re-taking People’s Park, response ranged, in the paper’s words, “from enthusiasm and nostalgia to charges … of irresponsibility, blatancy, and ‘poor planning.’” Even before the clash in the park, the editors took the unusual step of running a minority, follow-up editorial (see previous page) apologizing for the first one.

investigated us for conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. Our attorney informed us that such a conspiracy could be prosecuted as a felony. For good reason, the three of us were frightened. A misdemeanor for blocking a sidewalk is one thing. A felony conviction would impact the rest of our lives. Did we instigate a “riot” on purpose? No. Were we willing to go to prison for our commitment to the First Amendment? Not if we could help it.

In the end, a University panel dismissed the citations, and the district attorney decided not to file criminal changes. The Alameda County DA had attempted several times to convict Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton on manslaughter charges.

With each attempt, a mistrial was declared.

If the DA couldn’t take advantage of systemic racism against a radical Black defendant, how could he convict three college students wrapped in our white-skinned privileges?

While we editors escaped the most serious consequences of our decision, the fallout of our decision didn’t stop there.

The firings and resignations led incoming editors to break with the University. After a hundred years of operating under the paternalistic control of campus administrators, the Daily Californian started 1971 as an independent entity.

The paper’s first off-campus home was a cheap, second-floor rental at Haste and Telegraph, right next door to People’s Park.

Somebody volunteered a flatbed truck to move office equipment from the Daily Cal’s spacious former digs in Eshleman Hall.

The staff provided the labor. Toni Martin took the reins as the first editor in chief of the newly liberated Daily Cal. Today, she defends the May 11 editorial, saying, “we had the right to make the mistake of an over-the-top editorial.” But, she adds, “we had to grow up fast.”

Relations with the University administration remained tense, if not exactly hostile. In negotiations, campus higherups pressured the paper to give up the name, the Daily Californian. The University wanted the newspaper to survive, but didn’t want to take any heat if the independent Daily Cal caused any more problems with Gov. Reagan and the Board of Regents.

In the end, the University backed down and even donated the old oak office furniture with the names of the former editors inscribed inside the drawers. It also bought a block of 10,000 subscriptions to the Daily Cal, providing a base income.

Still, it was nothing like the support

the paper had received before. As Emshwiller put it, “The Daily Cal had a cushy life under the University umbrella.” Now, it would have to fend for itself, selling advertising to remain solvent.

Current Editor in Chief Sarah Harris ’21 explains that today, the paper still struggles to survive financially. Distributed free in both print and online versions, the Daily Cal depends on ad revenues for more than 60 percent of its operating capital.

Further support comes from students, who in 2016 approved the INK initiative, a fee of $2.50 per student to support the paper.

However, that revenue, which makes up 23 percent of the current annual operating budget of $600,000, ends in 2022. Another 16 percent of the budget comes from donations to the Daily Californian Education Foundation (DCEF) , a 501c3 charitable organization.

“I won’t lie,” Harris says. “Financially, it’s been tough.” But she feels independence is worth it. “The Daily Bruin at UCLA and The California Aggie at UC Davis have had issues with their media boards interfering with their editor in chief elections.”

At the independent Daily Cal, the entire newspaper staff elects the next editor in chief without influence or interference from the ASUC or UC administrators. A free student press, Harris feels, should serve as a watchdog on these two powerful stakeholders. “If it’s not us calling them out or reporting on mistakes, who will do it?

“I can’t imagine not being independent. To me, [it] adds to our credibility. … And given the history of free speech at Berkeley, it just makes sense that we’re independent.”

She adds that “universities can publish their own good news.”

It’s not just lefties like me and the other Daily Cal 5 who agree with that sentiment.

Daily Cal alumnus Max Boot ’91, is a conservative columnist for the Washington Post and a Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I loved writing for the Daily Cal,” he says. “My colleagues loved it when I riled up the Berkeley community by expressing conservative opinions. I still appreciate the Daily Cal’s willingness to challenge Berkeley orthodoxy. That’s what a newspaper should always do, and that’s what the Daily Cal did.”

So whatever became of the so-called Daily Cal 5? Inciting a riot might not bode well for the future employment of student journalists. Where does that go on your resume? As John Emshwiller recalls, “My

“I CAN’T IMAGINE NOT BEING INDEPENDENT. TO ME, IT ADDS TO OUR CREDIBILITY.… AND GIVEN THE HISTORY OF FREE SPEECH AT BERKELEY, IT JUST MAKES SENSE....” —SARAH HARRIS ‘21, DAILY CALIFORNIAN EDITOR IN CHIEF

journalism career hadn’t begun. And then it seemed like it was over.”

His concerns were misplaced, however.

In fact, each of the Daily Cal 5 went on to forge careers as journalists.

After graduation, the Wall Street Journal hired Emshwiller as a reporter in San Francisco, “because I was cheap and available,” he recalls, half-jokingly. Since then, he has shared in several national journalism awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. His reporting on Enron contributed to the company’s 2001 collapse and the subsequent federal investigations that sent top executives to prison.

Trish Hall worked for several small newspapers in Connecticut before landing jobs at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, where she eventually became the op-ed editor, one of the most coveted positions in the business. After leaving the Times in 2017, she published a book called Writing to Persuade, which distilled the lessons from her career editing opinion.

Fran Hawthorne worked as a financial reporter for many years and wrote regularly for the New York Times, Newsday, and others. She has written nine books, including a novel, The Heirs, published in 2018, and is working on two more.

Jim Blodgett, who died in 2008, was the founding managing editor of Night Times, a short-lived entertainment newspaper headquartered in Berkeley. Jann Wenner, another Daily Cal alumnus, had launched Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco in 1967, and Blodgett felt the Bay Area needed an entertainment publication with a local focus.

In 1971, I left Berkeley and moved to a commune outside Susanville, in the northeast corner of California. A local weekly hired me as a reporter. A year later, a professor at the local community college called. Was I the same Dozier that Cal fired for inciting a riot at People’s Park? Warily, I said I was. He asked if I’d like to serve as faculty adviser to Lassen College’s student newspaper. I found it odd that he wanted to hire me as the “adult in charge.” I later learned that he too had once worked at the Daily Cal. That’s how I began my teaching career. I’m now an emeritus professor of journalism at San Diego State, where I taught for 37 years.

Looking back now at that long-ago editorial, I feel bad for the people injured and arrested, but then civil disobedience does come at a cost. I was busted during the Third World Liberation Front strike in ’69. My attitude: Getting arrested and convicted is a good way for a white 19-yearold from a privileged, politically conservative family to learn what’s wrong with the criminal justice system. For me, graduating with a criminal record was part of a wellrounded Berkeley education.

Some folks put property above people.

That’s what Alameda County sheriff ’s deputies did when they fired on unarmed protesters in 1969. But destruction of property is also tactically unwise. When political actions involve destruction of property, then property damage takes the focus off the real issues involved. That said, do I feel any remorse about the damage done to the University fence around People’s Park back in 1971? No, I feel sorrow for Alan Blanchard and the late James Rector.

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BY REP. LINDA SÁNCHEZ ’91 (D-CALIF.) AND REP. COLIN ALLRED, J.D. ’14 (D-TEX.) AS TOLD TO KATHERINE BLESIE �21 AND LEAH WORTHINGTON

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: KRISTIE BAXTER: LEAH HERMAN; MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/SIPA VIA AP IMAGES; JOHN NACION/NURPHOTO VIA AP

“A DAY UNLIKE ANY OTHER”

BRENT STIRTON/GETTY IMAGES

REP. LINDA SÁNCHEZ: The night before [the Electoral

College vote count], I called my husband and said, “In case anything happens to me, I want you to know where my will is.” He tried to reassure me, but I couldn’t shake my growing sense of unease.

The members of Congress who would be there on January 6 had been briefed about security protocol and told that the Capitol Police would have everything under control, but nothing I was told felt very convincing. The Capitol Police wouldn’t give out specific details about their security plan because they said they didn’t want the information to be leaked. That kind of stuck in the back of my mind. I had been seeing all of these stories about how people were being encouraged to show up with guns—that really made me uneasy.

When I got to the Capitol, I didn’t notice a big police presence. It looked like a normal day. During the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, the police looked like stormtroopers. They had on bulletproof vests and shin guards and helmets. REP. COLIN ALLRED: I woke up early. My famI didn’t see any of ily was with me in D.C.—they’re not always that on the 6th. there, but they were this time. I said goodbye. I drove into the Capitol and prepared for a long day—we’d been told that it might run all night.

I knew I was going to be on the floor during the joint session of Congress. We didn’t have a huge number of people on the Democratic side, and everyone was socially distancing for COVID. The Republicans, on the other hand, were sitting close together and, I think, excited about having the chance to overturn the election results.

I remember the vice president, the Senate pages with the Electoral College results, and then the members of the Senate filing in. They started the process, which begins with Alabama—no challenge there. Alaska, no challenge there. And then Arizona. Ted Cruz [R-Tex.] stood up and said that he, along with the members of the House, were challenging the results. We recessed, split into our two different bodies, and began debating.

That was when we started getting notifications.

IT LOOKED LIKE A NORMAL DAY. DURING THE BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTS OVER THE SUMMER, THE POLICE LOOKED LIKE STORMTROOPERS. I DIDN’T SEE ANY OF THAT ON THE 6TH. —REP. LINDA SÁNCHEZ

SÁNCHEZ: I was on the House floor with some of my colleagues when I got a phone alert saying that the Madison Building—one of the buildings in the Library of Congress—was being evacuated. I wasn’t too worried because the Madison Building actually gets evacuated periodically for things like if somebody leaves a backpack unattended, and they think it’s a bomb. It’s also not as close to the Capitol Building as, say, the House office buildings.

But then about 10 minutes later, I got a second update from the Capitol Police that they were evacuating the Cannon House Office Building. That’s a building that has members’ offices in it. That’s when something triggered in me. I just got this intuition that said, “You need to leave the Capitol and go back ALLRED: My office is in the Cannon Building, and we got a notification that they were to your office.” I got evacuating because of a potential bomb up from the gallery threat. My wife, who was seven months and got into the pregnant and at home with our 23-month- elevators that take old, was texting me and saying that it me back through the looked really bad outside of the Capitol. tunnels to my office.

A few minutes into the debate, security detail swooped into the chamber and took the speaker, the majority leader, and the majority whip out pretty aggressively. I remember thinking that was very strange.

Jim McGovern [D -Mass.] took over and tried to continue, but the Capitol Police came in saying the building was under attack, that we were to shelter in place.

We were just sitting and waiting.

Then the order came for us to pull out the gas masks beneath our chairs—they call them “hoods”—because they had deployed tear gas in the rotunda. The rotunda’s only a few feet away from the House floor, and I just couldn’t believe that this was happening. Ruben Gallego, who’s a Democratic congressman from Arizona and a former Marine, was standing up on one of the chairs and yelling to breathe slowly when you put the gas mask on so you don’t hyperventilate. At this point, I’m texting my wife, and she’s asking where I am. I said, “I’m on the House floor,” the assumption being that, if you’re on the floor, you’re basically in one of the most protected spaces in the country. And I sent her a text that I never thought I’d have to send in this line of work saying, “Whatever happens, I love you.”

She just wrote back, “I love you too.”

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I TOOK OFF MY JACKET AND STOOD UP—I’M A PRETTY BIG GUY, YOU KNOW. I PLAYED NFL. I TOOK A STANCHION, UNSCREWED IT, AND HAD IT IN MY HAND LIKE A CLUB. I FIGURED IF THIS WAS THE LAST STAND, I WAS GOING TO ARM MYSELF. —REP. COLIN ALLRED

40 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

SÁNCHEZ: I looked up at one point, and in one corner of the room there were maybe 25 Republican members of Congress without their masks, just on their phones and chatting with each other. I went over to the Capitol Police, and I said, “Can you enforce that?” They said no, and I said, “OK, I’m going back. I’d rather take my chances in my office.” They wouldn’t let me walk back by myself, so a few minutes later a police captain escorted me there, and my chief and I shoved the desks in front of the doors again.

We sat like that for hours until they were able to clear the Capitol.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/MANUEL BALCE CENETA; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; AP PHOTO/ANDREW HARNIK

SÁNCHEZ: I was walking toward the elevator when I heard a boom in the distance. I didn’t know what it was, so I took the elevator back to my office, where I got an order to shelter in place that said to stay away from WE WERE IN MY OFFICE MAYBE HALF AN HOUR WHEN WE HEARD THE HEAVY the windows, turn off the lights, and silence our elecFOOTSTEPS IN THE HALLWAY. THEN WE HEARD POUNDING ON OUR DOOR. tronic devices.

MY CHIEF AND I LOOKED AT EACH OTHER, AND IN THAT MOMENT OUR HEARTS My chief of staff was in my office with me. She and I KIND OF STOPPED. —REP. LINDA SÁNCHEZ barricaded the door. We grabbed the baseball bats from my closet that I once used in a congressional baseball game and hunkered down. We kept the TV on, without SÁNCHEZ: We were in my office maybe half an hour when sound, because we wanted to know what was going on. we heard the heavy footsteps in the hallway. It sounded What we saw on the TV was violent—glass was shatterlike more than one person. Then we heard pounding ing and the Capitol Police were being overrun and peoon our door. My chief and I looked at each other, and ple were using flags to beat the doors down and get in. in that moment our hearts kind of stopped. Then the Then they said that the Capitol had been breached. people identified themselves as Capitol Police.

I just sat there thinking, “Oh, my god, they’ve breached They took us to a secure location in the Longworth the Capitol.” I couldn’t wrap my Building. I was there for maybe eight minutes with head around it. How long before ALLRED: I took off my jacket and stood up— my colleagues who had been trapped up in the gallery. they get into my building? Into I’m a pretty big guy, you know. I played Everybody was in shock. my office? I was terrified. Given NFL. I took a stanchion, unscrewed it, the security response so far, I and had it in my hand like a club. I figured ALLRED: We were evacuated through a had no idea what was going to if this was the last stand, I was going to series of tunnels and taken to a secure locahappen. arm myself. We could see that the Capitol tion. We were there for four hours, maybe I kept thinking over and over Police on the House floor—who wear suits longer. It was tense in that room, in part again, “I have an 11-year-old son. and normally look just like anyone else— because some of the biggest proponents of I want to live to see him grow up.” had their guns drawn. They barricaded the the rally, the ones most fired up about chaldoors with furniture. They’re not security lenging the results, were also in the safe doors; they’re very old, they’re supposed to room. There’s a certain irony in that. But be decorative. As we were trying to evacu- the biggest divide in our politics isn’t really ate, I could see the glass being broken on between Democrats and Republicans; it’s the doors, like they were trying to break between those who believe in democracy through. It was surreal. and those who don’t. And unfortunately, we have members of Congress who showed that they don’t really believe in democracy.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; OLIVER CONTRERAS/SIPA VIA AP IMAGES; ASSOCIATED PRESS; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE (2)

ALLRED: A lot of pictures I was seeing online

seemed like it was like a LARP [live action role playing game]. Having been there and heard the shouts and the banging, I knew that it was much, much worse and that we’d come very close to a mass casualty event.

Of course, it turned out later that there were a lot of folks who were there to try and kidnap or detain—or execute—members of Congress and the vice president.

Because I’d been on the floor, I hadn’t seen Trump’s speech. But I knew that he’d called this rally, that he told people to come on January 6. He told them it was going to be wild. He said the vice president could choose to ignore the results and overturn the election. He fed these people all these lies and, in the words of Liz Cheney [R-Wyo.], “ H e a s s e m b l e d SÁNCHEZ: It’s shocking to me that people were allowed the mob, and he lit to come in and trash the Capitol, that it was so easily the flame that led breached. Not only did they break glass and doors and to the attack.” It furniture, what’s really sick to me is that they shat and dawned on all of us, peed in the Capitol, like animals. They desecrated the certainly me, that seat of our democracy. I just can’t imagine somebody this is the worst doing that and thinking that they were a patriot. attack on American These were people who thought that the election democracy since had been stolen. They were fed a continuous loop of the Civil War. This lies that was encouraged by the president, repeated by is the second time his advisers, and fortified by members of Congress. in our history that It’s like facts don’t exist for these people. We’ve t h e r e ’s b e e n a n got to do a better job of fighting misinformation. enemy force that People everywhere need to stand up and defend our h a s e n t e r e d t h e democracy against people who repeat lies for politiUnited States Capi- cal gain. We can’t begin to heal as a nation until there tol. There had to be is accountability, and it’s up to the public to hold these consequences. people accountable.

ALLRED: I wanted to get back as soon as we

could. I thought it was very important that we go back to the House floor, that we not let these insurrectionists win. Even after all that, the Republicans still challenged the Pennsylvania results. That was one of the most disappointing things of the entire day.

But the most important thing was that we came back and affirmed the results.

We didn’t end up casting the final votes to certify the Pennsylvania results until 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Finally the gavel came down, and we went home.

I’m not sure that any of us feel safe anymore. Even driving home, you don’t know— you assume that many of the folks inside the Capitol are still in Washington. But I was glad just to pull into my garage and put the day behind me.

I WENT TO THE AIRPORT TO FLY HOME, AND IN MY BOARDING AREA WERE ALL THESE MAGA PEOPLE WITHOUT MASKS ON, BOASTING AND BRAGGING AND GLEEFUL ABOUT WHAT THEY HAD DONE. IT WAS LIKE BEING RE-TRAUMATIZED. —REP. LINDA SÁNCHEZ

SÁNCHEZ: It was a day unlike any other—I can’t forget

it. I just want to cry for our democracy.

There are still members of Congress today that will say the election was stolen and that advocate violence against members of Congress. I don’t feel safe going back to the Capitol to work with members that are carrying guns and not obeying the protocols of going through metal detectors.

If these insurgents had reached the floor, there’s a good chance that many of my colleagues would not be here today. Once the adrenaline rush was gone, I started to feel anxiety and panic. I went to the airport to fly home, and in my boarding area were all these MAGA people without masks on boasting and bragging and gleeful about what they had done. It was like being re-traumatized all over again.

I almost couldn’t make it on the plane. My heart was racing. I was hyperventilating. But I wanted to get home to something that was familiar and comforting. I wanted to see my family, who, at certain points in that day, I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see again.

So I put my headphones in and got on the plane.

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42 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

LEFT TO RIGHT: ISTOCKPHOTO; SHUTTERSTOCK

Three Berkeley Alumni, Writers for The Simpsons and Futurama, Discuss the Nerdier Side of Comedy

By Dano Nissen ’18

HOMER: AA FILM ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

OR CENTURIES, FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM

defied mathematicians to prove that there are, in fact, no natural numbers for x,y and z that can satisfy the equation x n+y n=z n when n is greater than 2. Countless great minds tried and failed, until 1995, when mathematician Andrew Wiles, after years of monk-like devotion, provided the undisputed proof once and for all.

That is, until he was seemingly proved wrong, a few years later, by none other than Homer Simpson, w h o s e o n l y m o n klike devotion is to doughnuts.

In an episode of The Simpsons called “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” Homer, dreaming of becoming an inventor, toils away in his basement, scrawling on the chalkboard:

3987 12+4365 12=4472 12—an equation that, per M. Fermat, should not, cannot exist.

And in fact, it doesn’t. Homer’s math was off. Not by much, but still. D’oh!

Of course, the real question isn’t where Homer went wrong, but, rather, how in the hell this esoteric math reference made it into a cartoon in the first place?

The answer can be found in Simpsons writer, David S. Cohen, whose master’s dissertation in computer science at Berkeley posed the following problem: You’re served a stack of pancakes all burnt on one side and arranged top to bottom in random size order. Being a very particular diner, you request that the stack be taken back and rearranged with the largest pancake on the bottom, the smallest on the top, and all the burnt sides facing downwards. And one more thing, the cook must rearrange the pancakes by inserting a spatula at a given point in the stack and flipping all the pancakes as one unit. What’s the most efficient way for the cook (who, by now, wants to kill you) to satisfy your order?

The problem is a variation of a classic pancake combinatorial problem first put forth by the mathematician Jacob Goodman, under the pseudonym Harry Dweighter. As in “harried waiter,” get it?

Turns out, math is kinda funny—and so are philosophy and computer science, at least judging by the fact that three Cal alumni with advanced degrees in those subjects—including Cohen ’92, J. Stewart CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 43

44 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

mathematics has the form of a joke,” says Holt. “Proofs should be as short as possible and should have a twist that is going to be ingeniously “A GOOD PROOF IN MATHEMATICS absurd. There’s a formal isoHAS THE FORM OF A JOKE,” SAYS HOLT. morphism between a math“PROOFS SHOULD BE AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE ematical proof and a good AND SHOULD HAVE A TWIST THAT IS joke of the absurdist body.”

By Holt’s standards, FerGOING TO BE INGENIOUSLY ABSURD.” mat’s Last Theorem is a veritable sidesplitter.

“Being good at pure mathematics and comedy means seeing completely unexpected connections between seemingly very dissimilar things,” he says. “The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was essentially obtained by showing elliptical functions in modular forms had this deep and unexpected connection.”

Fo r h i s p a r t , Cohen tries to avoid drawing too close a parallel between math and gag writing. But he is certain of one thing: “Every writer on The Simpsons is some kind of a nerd basically.

Legal nerd. History nerd. I was the sci-fi/ math nerd at the time.” The trend continued when he was in charge of the Futurama writers’ room. “I, in turn, hired a bunch of even nerdier writers.”

One of those nerds was J. Stewart Burns, who says, “comedy writers are a weird bunch … but way less weird than mathematicians.”

He would know. Burns completed his undergraduate degree in math at Harvard and, like Cohen, wrote for The Lampoon.

“My interest in comedy came more out of my interest in joining this club that had a really cool building,” he says. The Lampoon had other perks: “[They] had parties in tuxedos and ate lobsters. … I thought I was wrecking my potential career by avoiding classes and spending all my time there.”

Little did he know.

Also like Cohen, Burns went on to pursue a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, but left early with a master’s and a couple of spec scripts for Hollywood.

He staffed on The Simpsons and then Futurama, where “all of the sudden, half our staff had majored in math.”

HOMER: THE SIMPSONS/FOX; DONUT: ISTOCKPHOTO

Burns, M.A. ’93, and Eric Kaplan, Ph.D. ’17—have logged long, impressive careers writing for The Simpsons and Futurama, the Matt Groening franchises that practically redefined American humor. Struck by this fact, California decided to probe a bit deeper to see what, if anything, might explain this connection between heady academic pursuits and, say, Krusty the Clown.

Professionally, Cohen the writer goes by David X. Cohen. He added the “cool science fiction letter” because his birth name was already taken by a Writers Guild of America member when he applied. Technically, he was a professional comedy writer long before joining the Guild. “I would draw cartoons and force my sister to buy them,” Cohen says. But comedy wasn’t on his career radar until much later. “I grew up in a very science-y family …. As a kid, I never imagined anything else.”

Cohen went to Harvard to study physics, which, to his biologist parents, didn’t pass the science purity test. “I destroyed my parent’s dreams by being a physicist,” he jokes. He also wrote for the famed Harvard Lampoon, a breeding ground for many a sitcom writer.

He then attended UC Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in computer science where, he says, his colleagues were “almost uniformly very funny people.”

He left the Ph.D. program early with a master’s and his burnt pancake dissertation to take his professional comedy chops to a wider audience than just his sister. He landed his first gig when soon-to-be TV comedy legend Mike Judge (an engineer in a previous career) was looking for “the very cheapest writers available” for his show Beavis and Butt-head. He would go on to staff write for The Simpsons and co-create Futurama.

In his many years writing for television, Cohen has come up with a theory on why there are so many math and science people on these two shows: “[Stories are] pitched in the form of a dramatic story with a beginning, middle, and end …. It has to have those key elements before you start the funny. In some respects if you were to look at it as a math proof, the story is the mathematical progression to get from your beginning stage to your end stage.”

Jim Holt agrees with that premise. A contributor to The New Yorker and former journalist-in-residence at Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Holt is also the author of a book on the history and philosophy of jokes called Stop Me If You’ve Heard This. “A good proof in

FUTURAMA: SYFY

Perhaps because of that, he says, the Futurama room dealt more with abstractions that could be turned into jokes. By contrast, “At The Simpsons, I would come in with a really good joke and they’d just be like, ‘No one laughed so we’re not doing that.’ I think that’s normally how things work.”

In the Futurama room, where the watercooler talk often sounded like oral exams, he found company in his predilection for solving hard problems. “We would be working on a script and all of a sudden get stuck on something and start working on a theorem,” he says. “In most rooms, you blow off time talking about politics or what your kids and wives are up to.” In Futurama, he jokes, “we didn’t have kids or wives or care about politics.”

Jim Holt puts forth three basic theories of humor.

The first, courtesy of Thomas Hobbes, is aggression. “Basically, making fun of people.” The second is repression theory, à la Freud.

“A joke enables forbidden material to bubble to the surface of consciousness by evading the censor.” We laugh when latent desires for sex and THE SIMPSONS ARE “ALMOST PURE violence sublimate into famINCONGRUITY,” HOLT SAYS—SOMETHING ily programming. “The third INTELLECTUALS OFTEN SPECIALIZE IN. is sheer incongruity,” he “PEOPLE WHO ARE AMUSED BY VERY says. “Reveling in absurABSTRACT INVESTIGATIONS ARE SEEING THE dity for its own sake and juxtaposing concepts that WORLD IN A WAY THAT DIVERGES RADICALLY seem to have nothing to do FROM THE PRACTICAL EVERYDAY MODE OF with each other but have an EXISTENCE OF MOST PEOPLE.” unexpected and amusing deep affinity.” He deems the third form the most advanced.

The Simpsons are “almost pure incongruity,” he says—something intellectuals often specialize in. “People who are amused by very abstract investigations are seeing the world in a way that diverges radically from the practical everyday mode of existence of most people …. They translate incongruities into Lebenswelt, the world ordinary people live in.”

But the genius of the Groening shows is that they also operate on those two other levels. “The crude stuff is never crudity for its own sake. It always is redeemed by

an aura of cleverness. There is something for everybody in The Simpsons. I like the way that even for the people really missing the highbrow jokes there are jokes at their level,” he says. “And the highbrow people can be flattered at the cultivation of their erudition.”

Still, having a command of abstract thought doesn’t necessarily transfer to telling a good joke. “[There is] far from a perfect correlation,” admits Holt. He lists famous thinkers that wouldn’t pass muster at an open mic: mathematician Kurt Gödel, linguist Noam Chomsky, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. No apparent sense of humor. That may help explain why Netflix is currently bereft of any existential standup specials. But Eric Kaplan, yet another Simpsons and Futurama writer with a Cal degree (Ph.D., philosophy), has a suggestion—Søren Kierkegaard.

“Kierkegaard thinks that there are certain contradictions in human life and they’re unavoidable. So the best you can do is to feel them very intensely. Rather than come up with some way to think your way out of the contradiction you basically should acknowledge it and feel it. One of the best ways to do that, although not the best according to Kierkegaard, is comedy. Because comedy has to do with feeling the contradictory nature of a situation you are in.”

Kaplan has thought quite a bit about this subject. His dissertation, which he completed in 2017, was on comedy and the philosophy of Kierkegaard. He began his doctorate 25 years prior and left after four years to write for television. In his almost quarter-century leave of absence, he wrote for a wide range of programs. Among other credits, he staffed on The Big Bang Theory and Futurama, wrote an episode of The Simpsons, and co-created the irreverent Adult Swim cartoon The Drinky Crow Show.

How is he able to hit so many different comedic notes? His academic background may have helped. “Philosophy is supposed to be a way that can communicate to anybody,” he says. As an undergrad, he also was interested in cross-cultural philosophy and majored in comparative religion, a great primer for understanding different worldviews—and different audiences.

“When I look at the difference between Adult Swim and The Big Bang Theory, one thing I would say is people have different appetites for discomfort,” he says, pointing out the former whets that appetite, the latter not so much.

And which would Kierkegaard have written for had he lived to see cable television?

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 45

IN THE 2000’S, UC BERKELEY OFFERED A DECAL COURSE called “The Simpsons and Philosophy.”

(DeCal stands for Democratic Education at Cal. All classes are student-led.)

As it happens, Tyler Shores ’06, the founder of the course, says he taught a lesson on the very subject of Kierkegaard and existentialism (see mainbar). To help illustrate the philosopher’s ideas, he screened clips from the eighth-season episode “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer,” in which Homer eats a chili pepper so hot it sends him on a hallucinogenic spiritual journey led by an imaginary coyote voiced by Johnny Cash. Near the end of the episode, Homer says, “I’m a lonely, insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold, indifferent sun.”

Shores, now program manager at University of Cambridge’s ThinkLab, says, “That’s a good entrée to the existentialism question.”

Each class would pair a topic in philosophy with an episode. “We would do Marxism. We would talk about the revolt of the proletariat and the difference between base and superstructure,” says Shores. “And now, let’s watch this Simpsons episode where you see some of these things apply.”

Then they’d watch the episode in which the nuclear power plant workers go on strike.

After discussing Plato’s Republic, Shores would show the episode in which Mensa, the high-IQ society (of which, naturally, Lisa is a member), takes control of Springfield, à la Plato’s philosopher-kings.

For theology, the class would watch the episode in which Homer invents his own religion of laziness, worshipping at the altar of his couch, in order to skip church. “What if we picked the wrong religion?” muses Homer. “Every week, we’re just making God madder and madder.”

The course was a hit, filling lecture halls in Dwinelle Hall and the Valley Life Sciences Building semester after semester. Each 90-minute class consisted of a lecture, which included an episode screening, followed by discussion sections. There was even a textbook: The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh of Homer.

While the course is no longer offered, the website lives on. As the text there explains, “The course was created not necessarily with the premise of finding a philosophy of The Simpsons, but rather to elucidate philosophy through The Simpsons.”

– D.N. 46 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Dano Nissen ’18 is a freelance journalist.

He’s covered red carpets for Variety, regularly contributes to NPR member station KCRW, and is a proud UC Berkeley alumnus.

SIMPSONS: THE SIMPSONS/FOX; ANT: ISTOCKPHOTO

Teaching Homer at Berkeley

Kaplan says both. The Danish theologian adopted many different personas in his work, “each of which wrote differently and had a different philosophical perspective,” he explains. “And the kind of jokes that they made followed from their philosophical perspectives.” According to Kaplan, Kierkegaard’s mischievous and conniving Johannes the Seducer would be an Adult Swim writer. The ethics-bound Judge William would write for CBS. While Kaplan has a lot to say about the philosophy of humor, he’s part of a small club. “Philosophers have paid very little attention to comedy and have not said much that is of any value. That’s the sad truth. …. It’s a phenomenon [with] one leg in the rational and one leg in the irrational. Philosophers don’t like stuff like that …. They like both of the feet in the rational.

Comedy is a little unclear. Is it a form of thinking or just a reflex? It’s not a phenomenon that philosophy in its current incarnation is terribly well-set to deal with.”

Cohen, Burns, and Kaplan all expressed some skepticism about the link between their studies and their comedy, but those studies have been put to work. Remember Cohen’s combinatorial problem with the burnt pancakes? He confronted a similar problem as the showrunner of Futurama: The characters Fry and Leela have swapped brains and are unable to switch them back.

They are, however, able to switch brains with someone they have yet to switch with.

Question: Is it possible for everybody to get their brains back?

Cohen recalls that fellow writer Ken Keeler, who holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (yet another nerd Cohen hired), came in the day after the problem was posed with the solution. “He went to the dry-erase board and proved mathematically for any group of n people with their brains mixed up, they can be brought back to their original state by the one-way brain switcher as long as two new people (with their original brains) are added into the mix, with those two people also getting their brains back in the end,” he says.

In the resulting episode, Professor Farnsworth works out Keeler’s theorem on screen. Says Cohen, “I believe this is, in all likelihood, the only time in history that a mathematical theorem has served in such a heroic role in a TV comedy.”

PRO F E SSO R N E I L T S U T S U I O N WH AT WE CA N L E A R N F RO M H O W S O CI A L I N S E CT S D E A L WI T H DISEA SE Q& A BY L E A H WO R T H I N G T O N

L I FE

AND

IN

THE

C O LO NIE S IT’S A WARM, SPRING DAY. You’re sitting

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D E AT H

under a tree snacking on a bag of potato chips, when a breeze tickles your nose. You sneeze, sending a soggy crumb into the grass where it bonks an unsuspecting ant on the head. Unfazed, she nibbles the chip, then heaves it over her shoulder and carries it back to the colony. Little does she know that, during its brief flight from your mouth, this sticky glob picked up a fungal spore that is deadly to ants. Within a day she’ll be sick, within two she’ll be dead. And, so too, could her whole colony.

But, according to Neil Tsutsui, an expert in social insect biology and a professor of environmental science, policy, and management at UC Berkeley, that’s not likely to happen. “It’s probably not that common that a pathogen comes in and wipes out an entire colony. They have all of these things that seem to be pretty effective at preventing that from happening.”

According to Tsutsui, despite their “tiny little brains” and lack of individual intelligence, ants, bees, and other highly social insect species are uniquely adept at disease control. From preventative medicine to self-isolation, they’ve evolved many clever strategies to detect and prevent potentially devastating pandemics.

So, more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic first reached the United States, as death tolls climb and vaccinations drag, might we learn a thing or two from the social insects crawling and buzzing around us? Tsutsui offers a qualified yes.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Highly social animals, like ants and bees, are particularly prone to disease. How do they protect themselves?

The eusocial insects—the ants, bees, wasps, and termites—have societies that are similar in some ways to really urbanized metropolitan areas. Within their colonies, they’re packed close together in large numbers, which creates a dynamic where diseases and parasites can spread really easily.

But then they also have some other features of social organization that make them even more vulnerable than we are. In many cases, a colony is headed by a single queen, which means that everybody else in a colony is a close relative. So if a disease gets a foothold in the colony and infects one individual, that probably means that others are likely to be susceptible to the same thing.

And that also means that genetic diversity is low within a lot of these colonies. So if a pathogen sweeps through and wipes out all the vulnerable individuals, that’s likely to not leave behind many that are genetically different, that have some sort of resistance.

And then, of course, some of these social insects, especially ants and termites, nest in soil or in rotten logs. So they come into close contact with a substrate that is full of bacteria and fungi.

All of these things are features of their biology that you would expect to make them vulnerable. [But] you know, ants have been around for over 150 million years.

For the past 60 million years or so, they’ve been pretty abundant terrestrial organisms. Part of that is because they’ve evolved mechanisms to compensate for these vulnerabilities. There are tons of things they do to control pathogens in their colonies.

They’re fairly clean organisms. If you watch an ant, or even a cockroach or a fly, for any length of time, one of the first things you’ll see them do is clean themselves. They’re

48 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

So ants produce this wax and then spread it over themselves, almost like hand sanitizer?

It’s a multifunctional thing. These hydrocarbons probably evolved in insects initially to prevent them from drying out.

Small organisms are really vulnerable to desiccation, and so this helps prevent that.

But they do also produce chemicals that are like hand sanitizers. We have a project going on in the lab right now where we’re looking at chemicals that are produced by Argentine ants, which are the ants that we have around our houses here in California.

They use them as their trail pheromone, so when you see the ants marching along in a line, they’re following this chemical trail. But it turns out they also have them on their body, they put them on surfaces within their colony. And we’ve cultured bacteria and fungi from the soil that they nest in and shown that this chemical also has antimicrobial properties.

Besides keeping themselves clean, how else do social insects protect their colonies from disease?

Well one of the hallmarks of eusocial insects, and one of the things that makes them so fun and interesting to study, is that they have complex behaviors. During the lifespan of an ant, or a honeybee, they do different jobs. The youngest ant or the youngest honeybee, they take care of the other babies, they clean out some of the cells around where the brood are growing. The very oldest foragers go out in the world—they’re encountering pathogens and potentially bringing them back to the colony—but once they arrive back, they hand off the pollen or the nectar to somebody else inside the hive, who then takes it farther in and packs it in the food storage area. And those individuals are not the ones that are around the queen or taking care of the babies. The same is true for ants.

And because of this organization of tasks, both spatially and across ages, it creates a barrier to pathogens getting in the colony.

One of those jobs actually is taking care of dead individuals. So the middle-aged bees will often go through a task repertoire known as “undertaking.” If there are dead or very sick individuals in the colony, they’ll pick them up and fly them 50 meters

or 100 meters away and drop them. They want to get all of the dead individuals out of the colony. And ants do this, too. Ants in our lab colonies will make a graveyard in a distant corner where they put all of their dead individuals. They want to keep those away from everybody else.

They’re assuming that there’s something that killed them that would spread to the rest of the colony?

It’s just a hygienic behavior that has evolved. Individuals that, millions and millions of years ago, were picky about having dead ants in their colony had a higher survival rate. And that trait spread.

There have been experiments where ants have been killed or made very sick with carbon dioxide, and they’ll remove them.

In other cases, they can clearly recognize when an individual has been infected with a pathogen, so they will remove that individual, and they’ll groom themselves like crazy to make sure they don’t bring it back.

Then, of course, there’s the behavior of the sick individuals themselves. There’s lots of evidence from a variety of different species of ants that, if they are infected, they will self-isolate. They’ll do a shelter in place, but away from the colony.

Experiments have used fungal pathogens that are known to kill ants. You can take an ant, and you can put spores on it from this pathogen. And then you take control ants and you just put saline solution with no spores on them. Over the course of a fairly short amount of time, a day or two, before the ants die, the ones that have the spores recognize that they’re getting sick, and they will go and self-isolate away from the colony.

Will healthy ants and bees ever take away the sick ones and sacrifice them to protect the colony?

It’s possible. I can’t think of any examples, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that happened.

One of the tricky things for these insects is to be able to accurately distinguish who’s dead and who’s not. They have all kinds of chemical signals they’ve evolved to indicate death. E. O. Wilson, the ISTOCKPHOTO

constantly rubbing their hands. When they do that they’re removing spores of fungi from their body, they’re spreading around this waxy substance that acts as sort of a second skin to prevent microbes from getting inside their body.

famous myrmecologist [one who studies ants], did these well-known experiments back in the ’50s or ’60s, where he identified a pheromone that is produced by dead ants and put it on living ants. And their nest mates would carry them alive, kicking and screaming, over to the graveyard, until they had cleaned enough of it off of themselves to not seem like they were dead.

You study really complex and impressive coevolutionary strategies that ants use to protect themselves, and then you look around the world, and people won’t even put on a mask. Does it ever feel like humans are sort of inferior?

These social insects have this amazing sort of unitary purpose. They function as a really sophisticated, coordinated machine, where individuals display really extreme altruistic behaviors that we would find unimaginable in any human society. If you start feeling like you’re getting a cold, there’s no way you’re going to wander off and live in the forest until you die of starvation.

There are lots of things that these social insects do that are beyond the capacity, I think, of human society. And there are reasons for that—they’re structured very differently than we are. One thing that sort of counts against us is we have the ability to somewhat predict the future based on history and our current circumstances. Given that, you would think that humans would be much better about taking actions that would secure our future.

You see variation across human societies as well. There are some places in the world that have gotten the response to COVID-19 down really well. New Zealand seems to have done an excellent job. And there are other societies that are at the opposite end of the spectrum. The United States is not doing great.

ISTOCKPHOTO

Part of the problem seems to be that this pandemic is asking us to take a more communitarian, global mindset even though humans are fundamentally more individualistic.

There are lots of things that we are willing to do that are demonstrations of altruistic behavior. We’re excellent at coordinating our individual behaviors

toward a common purpose. But we also have many aspects of our behavior that are like a solitary insect where we’re looking out for ourselves and our close kin and our own individual interests. And I think that sort of solitary, individualistic perspective is what we’re seeing causing so many problems in the U.S. right now.

And then, of course, humans and our societies are complex. There are all kinds of things that just can’t be compared to other organisms like insects. Wearing a mask has become a symbol of something beyond just this pandemic; it’s a political indicator, in some ways. There are messages and misinformation coming in for political reasons or for reasons of personal profit. Those are things that don’t necessarily have a parallel in other organisms.

So, do you think that there are lessons to be learned from the way ant colonies respond to disease?

The one thing, above all else, that social insects can teach us is the power of cooperation and the power of many hands making light work. As humans, we have choices in the behaviors we exhibit. Whereas these social insects, they often don’t have a choice, right? They’re piloted by their genes and their evolutionary history. The example from the success of these social insects is the fact that they’re able to accomplish disease control as a result of their widespread cooperation. [This] suggests that, if we could just cooperate a bit more, then we would see similar success.

How might humans go about trying to build a more cooperative society?

It’s easy to see these societies of insects as very altruistic—these cooperative societies that are all working together toward a common goal. But these behaviors have been shaped by the same sort of selfishness that shapes solitary organisms. It’s really, in an evolutionary sense, just as selfish as favoring your own kids over somebody else’s. They’re still interested in increasing their fitness and transmitting as many of their genes to the next generation as they can. It just so happens that the way they can do that most effectively is by helping other individuals reproduce. The social insects that we’ve been talking about, for the most part, are the workers in the colony. And the reason that they’re able to do

all of these crazy things like self-sacrifice and going off and dying sick and alone, is because those are the behaviors that allow them to spread their genes to future generations. Since they’re not having offspring themselves, they’re helping their mother, the queen, produce new queens and males that then start new colonies that go on into the future.

There’s this analogy for the social insects: the superorganism. I think there are lots of features about that analogy that ring true. An insect colony basically has reproductive cells that are separate from the somatic cells and nonreproductive cells—the queen versus the worker. They regulate their environment. They regulate food flow. In that analogy, these behaviors that decrease the spread of pathogens, it’s a form of immune system. It’s like a social immune system. When you see an insect society from the perspective of a super­ organism, then it makes sense that they’re so united in the things that they’re willing and able to do.

Human society does not work nearly the same way. At the same time [that we’re] a society, we’re also individuals that are being propelled by our own individual motivations and needs. And those often conflict with the greater societal need.

Whereas in the social insect colonies, those things are aligned.

So, would it be better if we were more like ants?

There are good things and bad things, right? Being an ant is a tough life. It is harsh and unforgiving. Ants are pretty brutal. We think we fight bad wars between countries in human societies, but ants are relentless and merciless in the wars they fight. So there are some things they do very well that are probably worth trying to emulate. And there are some things that are just terrible.

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 49

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Changemaker in Chief

NOAH BERGER

Q&A with Berkeley’s Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer, Rich Lyons ’82

By Pat Joseph

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 51

Rich Lyons spent ten years (2008–2018) as dean of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he himself studied as an undergraduate, before being appointed the University’s first-ever chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer in January 2020.

A year later, California Editor in Chief Pat Joseph caught up with Lyons on a video call to talk about his new role and a push he’s making for a trademarked initiative called Berkeley Changemaker, which the website describes as “a way to codify an essential part of what UC Berkeley has always stood for” that also provides a “future-oriented narrative that our whole campus can rally behind.” We wanted to hear more.

The discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

So, Rich, let’s start with the new position: chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer. As I understand it, that’s a new title at Berkeley. What’s the role, and how are you defining it?

Well, one thing we don’t need is a lot of relatively high-priced administrators without clear work to do. So I think for a lot of people, the idea is this is like a pilot. Let’s see what happens if we add a little extra intentionality to the way that the so-called innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem at Berkeley evolves. What will that look like?

I’ll give you some examples. Let’s take bioscience, life science, and the entrepreneurship around it. We have this new Bakar BioEnginuity Hub that’s going to be a really exciting thing on campus. We’ve got the Innovative Genomics Institute, which is basic research and where our new Nobelist Jennifer Doudna does her work. We’ve got quantitative biology, QB3. We have this brand-new undergraduate dual-degree program in molecular and cell biology plus business. And we just got a gift for a new bio-entrepreneurship center. So, how do we make all of that add up to more than the sum of the parts? You know, it wasn’t anybody’s job to try to do that. Berkeley grows or evolves as a thousand flowers bloom. That’s part of Berkeley’s magic, but the idea is, let’s make sure these groups are talking to each other, so they’re not duplicating effort.

So that’s one concrete example. I’ll give you another one. In the capital campaign, there are five of what they call multidisciplinary themes. An example is energy, climate, and the environment. And David Ackerly is the titular coordinator of that theme from the faculty side. I am the titular coordinator of the innovation and entrepreneurship theme. That doesn’t mean I’m the only one out there fundraising for innovation and entrepreneurship, but the idea is: What are the campus-level narratives that might be most exciting to philanthropists, and how do I pull people together to articulate those storylines as best we can?

One overarching storyline I know you’ve been pushing is Berkeley Changemaker. Tell us what that is and how it came about.

It started with a course that was taught a couple years ago called Becoming a Changemaker by faculty member Alex Budak, and Alex is passionate about this 52 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Beyond himself: Lyons is obsessed with distilling the essential character of Berkeley.

area. It was open to the whole campus, and there were 17 different majors enrolled, which is a lot. And the average course rating was 6.7, on a seven-point scale, which is just off the charts. And in the qualitative comments people were saying things like: “I feel activated.” “I feel transformed.”

“I’m thinking about myself differently.”

“All of a sudden, I can kind of see myself as a leader.” And it was like, wow!

So that class was called Becoming a Changemaker. Then somebody else put the word Berkeley in front of it, and, long story short, we built a course last summer

NOAH BERGER

How does that intentionality manifest?

The Gate with that name, The Berkeley Changemaker, and offered it to incoming freshmen. About 500 took it.

So it’s like, OK, how do we help students understand that phrase “critical thinking” more deeply?

What’s the nature of the course? If I’m an incoming student, what am I going to leave the course knowing that I didn’t know before?

And this term “changemaker,” where does that come from? And how does it differ from, say, social entrepreneur, or even just leader?

EBRATIN EL

I think in some ways it’s a conflation of those and other things.

The term changemaker has a long history, and a lot of institutions have used that word, but no world-class research universities have said, We’re really going to go for this, we’re going to make it ours.

Now, it’s got to be demand-driven.

We’re not ramming this down anybody’s throat. But what if we do what I call a lineup test and we say, “Berkeley Changemaker.” Does that resonate for you? Does it resonate for somebody who’s not from Berkeley? There are a lot of people that have never been to Berkeley who would say, “Berkeley Changemaker, that kind of feels right to me.” Now, try “Harvard Changemaker.” Harvard’s great, but those two words don’t go together for me. I went to grad school at MIT. Let’s try “MIT Changemaker.” If you’re talking technology, it works beautifully. If you’re talking

Well, here I should own up to the fact that last time we talked, I very rudely offered my criticism.

And I welcomed that.

You did. I remember you wrote it down. The word I used was presumptuous. I thought it was a little presumptuous, since changemakers could come from anywhere.

They do.

But I was thinking more about it, and I think it’s also just that change is so double-edged. Sure, we need to change if we’re going to meet the challenges of global warming, for example.

But change also brings with it challenges and risks. CRISPR is a fine example of that. It’s a world-changing discovery, but boy, not all the changes that come with CRISPR will be welcome.

Yeah, and I love both of those points. You know, part of what Berkeley has always

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There are three content pillars in the gateway course: critical thinking, collaboration, communication. And you may ask, doesn’t every course at Berkeley have those three things?

Take me, I’ve got a Ph.D. in economics. I should be pretty studied at critical thinking. And I’m talking to Lisa Wymore [associate professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies] as we’re designing the course, and she’s talking, as a humanist, about the importance of empathy in critical thinking. Well, my economist mind doesn’t go there. I think mostly about rationality and reason. But her point being that if you want to really understand something, you have to see it from all sides. And it’s like, hmm, here I am at the end of my career and she’s schooling me on the way a humanist thinks about that phrase. So that’s just one example of what was an “aha” moment for me.

humanities and social evolution, then no, right? But Berkeley spans that space. And these are tough competitors. When you can leap out of a lineup against those players, that’s something.

But we invite folks to push back on us.

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CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 53

tried to do is stay away from presumptuousness. I think it’s in the DNA of this public institution. We don’t crow as much about our national championships as some other schools, for example. We just don’t.

But let me try and address the second piece because, at the end of the day, if it’s not founded on values, then you probably don’t have any mooring. You probably have a foundational problem.

And so, for example, if I said—and I don’t mean to pick on Harvard, but I’ll just use Harvard.

Go ahead. They can take it.

OK, so, try this. Harvard University: “Question the status quo.” There are a lot of great intellects on that campus who are questioning the status quo. But when you ask, does Harvard attract students who are questioning the status quo? Is that why the staff and faculty have gone there? Is that what it represents in society? I think the answer is no. And I think there’s a pretty objective standard for saying that.

Question the Status Quo, I know, is one of four defining principles you articulated while dean at Haas. The others are Confidence Without Attitude. Students Always. Beyond Yourself.

Do you see Berkeley Changemaker as an outgrowth of that exercise?

I think one way to say it is I’ve become kind of obsessed with trying to quantify the essential nature of things. But the first point I want to make is that those four principles are in some ways more congruent with Berkeley than they are with Haas, but Haas does its very best to live up to them, including changing admission decisions based on them. If those are just words on the wall, people should be skeptical. But if you’re saying, “No, nobody gets into the MBA program unless the interviewer feels that they are confident without attitude,” then it’s like no compromises; this is real.

We didn’t get that Haas process exactly right, but it has become a real attractor of talent. A lot of people are coming to Haas because of it, and we have real data on this.

But look, Berkeley is just this majestically complex institution, right? It just is.

And there’s no way that a single phrase like Berkeley Changemaker could fully summarize it. That said, if Berkeley continues to say we are so majestically complex that we could never and should never try to distill some of the essential parts of who we are, then that’s where I depart from those people.

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54 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

Let me paint an alternative picture, and you push back on me if this is wrong. It’s five years from now, there’s this 17-yearold in Stockton or San Diego or São Paulo or wherever. And that 17-year-old says, “I have to go to Berkeley. I’m not hearing a narrative anywhere near that clear from Princeton or Michigan or name-your-university with as sharp a story to tell and with the curriculum behind it.”

It isn’t just that we have a few new classes. It’s sort of like, no, we’re trying to bring in a different mix of people.

I’m not a big fan of the term “branding,” but I noticed that in a lot of the literature around Berkeley Changemaker, it’s more about this idea of identity-making, which I kind of like.

But as we’ve talked about before, Berkeley is such a hard identity to corral, because it has cultivated all these different identities: Cal versus Berkeley, for starters. There’s the “Go Bears” element. There’s the activist element.

And the elite, world-class research element. It isn’t easily resolved, is it?

No, it certainly isn’t, and I think we have to respect that. Berkeley needs to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

That’s part of what makes it so marvelous, that when we started to introduce some of these ideas, the humanists said, I love it.

And the engineers are saying, I love it. And the business people and School of Public Health are saying, I love it. It’s spanning a wider space, right?

If instead of the Berkeley Changemaker, the class that we had offered last summer was an introduction to entrepreneurship, maybe we could have built a successful class, but based on enrollments in entrepreneurship classes around campus, it probably would have been 60 percent men and 40 percent women. The Berkeley Changemaker course, the one that enrolled over 500 students, was 62 percent women.

So I think there’s an inclusion part to this.

Changemaking appears to be able to connect to a wider cross-section of people coming in, and that’s a good thing.

And do you think, when we talk about inclusiveness at Berkeley, there’s room in that for both progressive and conservative thinking?

One of the risks of coming out with this is like, wait, the chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer is one of the main flagbearers here? Is this just a euphemism for entrepreneurship and capitalism and things that some people aren’t fully vested in? We have to guard against that as well.

So, I sort of feel like if we’re intentional

The Gate about it, that the more market-oriented, libertarian views of the world could also look at this and say, I can buy that life.

I want a life of agency. I’m just going to define it differently than those folks there, but this is capacious enough to include me.

So should our readers expect to start seeing “Berkeley Changemaker” showing up in the literature that they’re sent, or even, say, splashed across the scoreboard at football games?

When they’re really going to start hearing about it is when it’s in admissions essays or an interview question. We haven’t really started that discussion, but we certainly intend to if students are saying that’s part of why they apply.

So there’s an admissions part of the process. And there’s obviously the curriculum part of the process. And more and more of this content is digital. It’s modular and we can pump bits of it out to the alumni network. But we thought we should get the internal curriculum worked out first. Some people are saying, Get it to other universities, make it systemwide. But we kind of want to get it right here first.

But again, there’s no entitlement: If this doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and we shut it down. But it does feel like it will continue to gather energy.

So we’re at the successful pilot phase.

Yep. Now imagine that in two years we have classes called Berkeley Changemaker: American Cultures; Berkeley Changemaker: Reading and Composition; Berkeley Changemaker: Quantitative Reasoning.

And then there are Berkeley Changemaker modules. You’ve got a three-unit class on international politics. We’ve got a simulation that we’re going to plug in to your course. It’s a Berkeley Changemaker– branded simulation. It’s an action component to your lecture class. Now, people start looking at it and saying, Oh, you can give the students a “why” to take quantitative reasoning. We’re not dumbing down any of the tools, and there are many other ways to satisfy that requirement on campus. But for a lot of students, it’s sort of like, give me a platform that matters to me.

I already know that this Changemaker platform matters, so go ahead and dish me the rigorous stuff in that framework.

And now we’re talking possibly 50, 60, 70, even 80 percent of undergraduates going through a Changemaker course while they’re at Berkeley. That’s not a crazy scenario.

Lifelong Learning Through Travel in 2021 Explore educational travel opportunities and enjoy our virtual programs by visiting alumni.berkeley.edu/travel.

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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

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 55

The title resonates. At a time of great crisis, like the one we are experiencing, we need the arts, to bring us moments of beauty, of profound reflection on the human condition, of heightened emotion captured in the symmetries of form.

The pandemic has had devastating consequences for the arts. Live performances—theater, music, dance—have stopped, with no clear sense of when they might resume. Many museums are shuttered. Income from ticket sales has dried up, arts organizations are facing financial crises, and many artists no longer have their traditional sources of income. For those who love the arts—and I certainly am one—the situation is of grave concern.

Many arts organizations have responded to this crisis with creativity and resilience, seeking to reimagine how they can reach audiences when we cannot gather in person. In early March of last year, when the campus moved to remote work and instruction, Cal Performances canceled all its events. The Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive have been closed since March 2020, as well. But both organizations have reached out to audiences in new and imaginative ways.

Cal Performances has created digital fall and spring seasons, featuring many of the artists who had been scheduled to perform live on the campus’s stages. About once a week, Cal Performances at Home brings into our homes films, made specifically for this series, of artists performing their work, often in unusual or striking venues. We can watch jazz trumpeter Bria Skonberg and her ensemble play an exhilarating concert in the garden of Louis Armstrong’s house in Queens. We can watch Yo-Yo Ma with his accompanist Kathryn Stott play a program, “Songs of Comfort and Hope,” featuring pieces like “Amazing Grace” and “Shenandoah,” performed at Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts Concert Hall. We can watch the Manual Cinema, a Chicago collective of musicians, composers, theater artists, and filmmakers, who combine paper puppets, live actors, and musicians to create startlingly original recreations of classics like Frankenstein and A Christmas Carol. Purchase of a ticket gives you access to most of these performances for months.

The Berkeley Art Museum also offers remarkable digital resources. My favorite is its virtual tour of the exhibition that opened right before the museum closed of Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts. The quilts are part of an extraordinary donation to the museum from the estate of Eli Leon of what now is the largest public collection of African American quilts in the world. Rosie Lee Tompkins is widely recognized as the most brilliant and inventive quilt maker of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; her quilts are like no others that I have seen before—joyful, moving, stretching the boundaries of the art form.

56 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

The shows go on: Clockwise from top: Jazzmeia Horn; Mitsuko Uchida; Jordi Savall; Renee Fleming; yMusic.

Listening to Bria Sondberg play her fantasy on Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird,” listening to Yo-Yo Ma play the plangent spiritual, “Going Home,” watching Manual Cinema’s reimagination of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a Black family Christmas gathering on Zoom, at which Aunt Trudy presents her late husband’s annual Christmas Carol puppet show in the isolation of her studio apartment—these at once take us out of ourselves and the difficulties of the current moment and give shape and significance, as only art can, to the human experience.

We all hope that we will enjoy art together again soon—wander through museum galleries, see music, dance, and theater live. As the world heals itself from this pandemic, art will be part of that healing—both in its restoration and the way it restores us.

—Chancellor Carol T. Christ

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JAZZMEIA: EMMANUEL AFOLAB; UCHIDA: JUSTIN PUMFREY; SAVALL: DAVID IGNASZEWSKI; FLEMING: ANDREW ECCLES; YMUSIC: GRAHAM TOLBERT

Since the pandemic began, Jeremy Geffen, director of Cal Performances, has been sending a weekly email to patrons, a play­ list of half a dozen or so performing arts videos, entitled “Now, More Than Ever.”

Class Notes 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: Summer 2021 issue: April 10 Fall 2021 issue: July 2

50

Our fellow vintners are continuing to produce outstanding wines. Dick Hafner and his family have built a long list of satisfied clients from their estate in Healdsburg and avoided the fall fires in that area.

Sally and Dick Ingraham received ribbons for their “Best of Show Whites” and “Most Visited Pouring Station for White Wine” at the Home Winemaker’s judging in Napa with their Mockingbird Hill Chardonnay. Paul McKnight continues to enjoy his home in the Rossmoor section of Walnut Creek. Bring your dog by for a special treat for Paul. With fond memories of our 68th Class Reunion at the stadium.

Class Secretary: Mimi Knox, 1700 Tice Valley Byron Park #222, Walnut Creek, CA 94595, Mimiaknox@comcast.net

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At last! The prospect of greeting 2021 with renewed vigor as the COVID-19 vaccine is in our midst. The following members speak well of surviving the 2020 experience: W. Lloyd Roberts of Redlands tells of a new residence with his wife at a senior retirement home where great effort was taken in their care. Lloyd retired from a career with the California Teachers’ Association. He obtained a pilot’s license to keep tabs on all the state activities. “Teacher’s Guide to School Law” and “Grievance Manual” are his writings. Marcia MacDonald Marling, who resided in San Mateo for many years, now calls Eureka home. Despite the loss of brother

Jack, Marcia enjoys three generations of family with great-granddaughter Terra observing social distancing rules. Now, may we hear more from our class and the survival skills we have all implemented? We are vital alumni greeting 2021, our 70th graduation year!

Class Secretary: Elayne McCrea, 23500 Cristo Rey Drive 503H, Cupertino, CA 95014 elayne.mccrea@yahoo.com

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Hail to California! And happy birthday to all of you who (like me) turned ninety in 2020. Perhaps your celebrations (like mine) were mostly on Zoom. Thanks to technology we can at least see each other smile even when the comments overlap and the sound gets kind of fuzzy. The written word is still an option, and thankfully the mail does go through. Write me a note so this column will have greater interest. In the meantime, best wishes to each of you and cheers for the Golden Crew of ’52! Fiat Lux! Class Secretary: Elaine (Hartgogian) Anderson, 1326 Devonshire Drive, El Cerrito 94530, 510/ 232-3419

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Jack Ken enjoys reading Class Notes and thought he’d fill us in on some of the alums who live at the Sequoias of Portola Valley. During the pandemic, to make up for the inability to eat or drink together, they’re allowed to hike or walk through their semi-wooded campus and the adjacent park trails. Due to their lack of personal contact, Jack said they just learned that Barbara Kinkead Dolliver had died in July. Alice Anderson and her husband Forest ’57 are well; Betty ’53, Jack’s wife, is holding her own; and Jack is carving large abstract sculptures. What’s so unusual about eleven Cal dudes gathering monthly for a confab?

They’re all octogenarians and widowers, or previously widowed! Seven of the following eight widowers are from the Class of ’54: Bob Denison, John Gwynn, Bob Merrick, Bill Prucha, Don Putnam, Jim Riewerts, Jim Wieking—and Tom Taylor ’55. Three of the widowers are remarried: Dwight Barker ’56, Frank Brunk ’50 (a nonagenarian), and Pete Newell. Carole Gerhardy Keim writes: “Forever grateful for education and lasting friendships made at Cal, and 3 summers on the Lair of the Bear staff. Married to Russell Keim B.S. ’50 and M.S. ’57, we had 4 children, the youngest (’91). In the years following Russ’ death in 1971, I taught in the San Diego Public Schools.

In the ’70s a ‘call’ to ministry came and I enrolled in the Pacific School of Religion and was ordained in 1980. Subsequently, I served as regional minister of three regions of the United Church of Christ. Fully retired now,

I live in my beloved Sierra Nevada and enjoy the beauty of the Lake Tahoe region while writing my history in gratitude for my abundant, rich life.”

Class Secretary: Beryl Smith Voss, 1330 Jones St., Apt. 604, San Francisco 94109, berylvoss@ gmail.com, 415/673-2074

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Ronald Robie reports: “I am not retired. I am still working as a Justice of the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento.” Ron has been a judge for 38 years—19 at the trial court and 19 at the Court of Appeal.

In addition to the court, he has been the Chair of the California Supreme Court Committee on Judicial Ethics Opinions for several years.

Ron’s wife (of 61 years), Lynn, passed on in 2019. Lynn served as a member of the Sacramento City Council for 13 years. She was only the second woman elected on her own. She was also an active nurse at her death. All this law and politics rubbed off on their children.

Son Todd is a lawyer in private practice in Sacramento, and daughter Melissa is a paralegal for the California Attorney General. Nancy Belling Boyarsky relates that before early retirement, she took an extension course in mystery writing. She finished her first novel in 1998, but couldn’t find a publisher. Looking at the heap of rejection letters, she decided this wasn’t fun anymore and turned to painting. Her artwork appeared in a number of shows, including the international exhibition at Filoli in Woodside. In 2013, she decided to self-publish her rejected mystery, The Swap, on Amazon. A review attracted a publisher who took over publication of The Swap, which won a gold medal in the Eric Hoffer book awards and was an eBook best seller. She has since had four more mysteries published and is working on the next, which will come out next year. She is also director and producer of her husband Bill Boyarsky’s (’56) podcast, Inside Golden State Politics, found online. Bill retired as city editor of the Los Angeles Times in 2001. He has since taught at Cal’s journalism department, USC, and Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. In addition to his previous books, he’s written two biographies during retirement and is working on a third. Roger Samuelsen and his wife, Jeane, lost a precious son a few months ago. Jamie Samuelsen was a respected and much loved sports announcer in the Detroit area. A few days before his death, he told his audience he had stage-4 colon cancer and urged everyone to have a colonoscopy. We embrace the family in our thoughts and hearts.

Class Secretary: Ann Bradshaw Jenkins, 109 Walnut Ave., Unit 102, Santa Cruz 95060, anndobie62@gmail.com CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 CAL1

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Heather McCune Thompson was in Berkeley years before most of us. She has fond memories of watching Cal football games in 1949 from her home near Panoramic Drive above the stadium. She joined other kids who were allowed into the stadium for the games’ ends. She recalls the strange sight of Pappy Waldorf being carried on players’ shoulders after a win. Priscilla Spires Wegars has been using this “lockdown” phase of life publishing another book, Polly Bemis: The Life and Times of a Chinese American Pioneer.

Polly was brought to Idaho Territory when she was 18 in 1872. Her life had been romanticized, and Pris wrote this book to counter the stereotyped and untrue legends which have been in circulation. The cover features a recently found photo of Polly (Caxon/AACC, 2020). Joy Holmes Maguire reports that the class council will be starting Zoom meetings to discuss ideas and examine options for our 60th anniversary before the Reunion Committee begins its work. Life continues! Let us know how you have put this strange year to advantage.

Class Secretary: Sandra Mitchell, 4816 SE 36th Ave., Portland, OR 97202, sandramitchellphd@gmail.com, 503-408-0092

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Belinda Shigley Farrell has authored a book that could be a coping mechanism for the pandemic: Find Your Friggin’ Joy. Published by Balboa Press in 2013, it draws on Ancient Hawaiian Teachings to teach us how to bring our lives into balance and unleash our personal potential. A certified Master Hypnotherapist/Past Life Regression as well as a Certified Reconnective Healing Practitioner, Linda practices in Santa Cruz. Broderick Perkins calls her a “New Millennia Renaissance woman offering good health and holistic healing.” Under the leadership of Marily Howekamp and Michael McGinnis, the Class of 1966 Endowment Committee has just sent a letter urging our classmates to contribute anew to the Class of 1966 Library Endowment. Now worth almost $1.3 million, this endowment has “provided support crucial to the Library in pivoting to provide virtual services during the COVID shut-downs.” One of the projects it supports is a pick-up service called the “Oski Xpress,” which makes material accessible not already available in virtual form. A user can make a request from one of 24 libraries, and then the material is retrieved and made available for touchless pick-up outside Moffitt Library. What a boon for anxious scholars during the pandemic! Betsy Erkkila has published her book, The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics, a collection of influential essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman.

Class Secretary: Mary Beth Mulvey Buck, 212 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10065, mabuck1@aol.com, CAL2 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

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This has certainly been an interesting year, full of adaptations and surprises. I have found I can order everything online to be delivered and have discovered a new way to attend Catholic Mass—virtually.

I now “go” every Sunday to some locations as far away as India, where a recent hymn was set to the music of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “500 Hundred Miles!” Here’s what’s been happening in the lives of some of our classmates: Sandra Sayre Flattery: We sold the house we built 20 years ago and moved into a new condo in the town of Ketchum, ID, where we can now walk and bike everywhere and have more time for travel once the pandemic is under control. Like all of you, we have had many challenges in 2020 but pray for a less divisive country and a return to a more normal life in 2021. Allan Gold: I’m still hanging in there (most common phrase besides “You’re on mute” and “I’m Zoomed out”). I have been working at my school psychology job in Tiburon both remotely and in-person this school year, trying to adapt my services to work with kids and adults behind plexiglass screens and with masks on, and supporting families who are really struggling with keeping their kids engaged with distance learning.

We haven’t been anywhere at all this fall and winter and will continue to stay hunkered down until we get the vaccine. I’m hoping that because I’m an educator I’ll get the vaccine relatively soon. I won’t be 75 until August so I’m a little too young for that criterion (first time I’ve been too young for anything in over 50 years). Of course, there’s a lot of Netflix to watch and Zooming with friends, so that has kept us amused. Like everyone, I miss the face-to-face contact with friends, going out to eat, traveling, etc., but I often am thankful that I’m this age. I can’t imagine losing everything that we experienced in the ’60s at Berkeley. Having lived this many years, we know that even these awful times will end and I am amazed at how resilient and flexible we really can be. Sheryl Wong: I have nothing for you.........sigh........except hoping for a better year in 2021 than 2020! And as always.......

Go Bears! Julie Banning Allen: I’m hunkered down with dogs and cows, wearing a mask when I leave the ranch and washing my hands relentlessly. I miss Rotary lunches, four days a week at the gym, and public meetings, not to mention dinners with friends and hugging grandchildren. But it has been a pretty good stretch for someone alone on the ranch with a dozen nice Angus cows, a couple of dogs, and a small “pod” of friends nearby. Forced solitude has given us all the opportunity to reevaluate what is important. Otherwise, the ranch hums along especially well now that we are between bulls. For now, all fences are intact and all is peaceful in the pasture. “Rediscovering” art has been my great joy. I set up a “studio-cumgym” with several sturdy academic easels and lots of tablets, pastels, charcoal, paints, and canvases. I take great comfort grounding

myself in this ground, in this landscape that invents and reinvents itself continually.

William C. Powers, Jr. was posthumously named President Emeritus of The University of Texas at Austin following a unanimous vote by the UT System Board of Regents in November. A longtime teacher, legal scholar, and advocate for diversity in higher education, Bill served as the president of UT Austin from 2006 to 2015. He was widely known for his scathing 2002 report detailing the collapse of the Enron Corporation. Bill continued teaching until his death in March of 2019.

Class Secretary: Diana Powers, 100 Marin Center Drive, #14. San Rafael 94903, dianapowe@aol.com

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Class of ’68 gatherings continue.

Gatherings are for classmates, all alums and friends of Cal. Given the current reality of keeping flexible with schedules, there will be more information on upcoming Gatherings in the near future. To join the Class of ’68 email list, please contact Cal68@ blueconnect.org and tell your friends. The Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE) Founded by the Class of ’68: The GSPP/CCDE Civility Fellowships Program continues to provide funding availability for eligible Advanced Policy Analysis (APA) projects advancing the Center’s mission. Criteria for projects include engaging an APA client and crafting a scope-of-work that is a solid fit with the Center’s mission and the Fellowship’s purposes. This includes: strategic-management studies of “trailblazer” organizations in civic engagement; design and/or evaluation of citizen-driven projects in local government; and policy analyses addressing challenges to civility and/or engagement and recommending necessary reforms.

CCDE continues to provide funding support for Cal undergraduates attending the UC in Washington DC (UCDC) program. Three Cal students will receive funding awards for the Spring 2021 semester to be held virtually for both classes and internships. Photos, bios, and essays by these students and those who have received funding from the Center in the past are available at: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/centers/ccde/program/uc-in-washington-dc-fellowships. For CCDE programs, including digital recordings of public lectures, see: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/centers/ ccde/public-events. Thanks also to those who contributed to The Big Give last spring and those who contribute to the Center ongoing.

See: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/centers/ccde/ give-to-the-center.

Class Secretary: Diane Moreland Steenman, 2407 W. Hazelhurst Court, Anthem, AZ 85086, dsteenman@aol.com, 702/521-5237

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Alan C. Mendelson retired from Latham & Watkins LLP effective Dec. 31, 2020, after 47 years of law practice.

Alan expects to serve on the board of directors of at least one public biotechnology company and as a special advisor to several other life sciences companies. He has also joined the Board of Trustees of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and is continuing to serve on the Board of Trustees of the UC Berkeley Foundation, the board of the UC Berkeley Library, the board of advisors of the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry and as a member the University of California Innovation Council.

Class Secretary: Richard Carter, 99 Florada Ave., Piedmont 94610, camktgrp@comcast.net

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Steven Pope recently self-published his first novel, And Like More Perfect, at age 72. His book, which features tales of time travel, crime, isolation, and exile, can be found at: https://amzn.to/3tG6YgB. Class Secretary: Louis Goldman, 465 Grove St., Glencoe, IL 60022, goldmanLB@yahoo.com, 312/622-8448

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Susan Alcorn, has announced a new hiking book, Walk, Hike, Saunter: Seasoned Women Share Tales and Trails, based on interviews with inspiring women hikers—all of whom are ages 45 or greater.

Meet Elsye ‘Chardonnay’ Walker, the first African-American woman to earn the Triple Crown of hiking (an award for hiking the

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: Summer 2021 issue: April 10 Fall 2021 issue: July 2

Pacific Crest, Appalachian, and Continental Divide trails). Read about Marcia ‘GottaWalk’ Powers, the first woman to walk across the U.S. on the American Discovery Trail. Learn about three women who are also “trail angels”—they’ve helped hundreds of PCT thru-hikers. Hiking can be rewarding at any age; planning, training, and otherwise preparing greatly increase the likelihood of a successful outing.

Class Secretaries: Joseph Curtis, 1715 Poplar Drive, Walnut Creek, CA 94595, chfc2000@ yahoo.com ; Stanley and Beverly Sugimoto, 776 Haverford Ave., Pacific Palisades, CA 90272, bsugimoto@aol.com

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Jennifer Keller, a nationally prominent attorney at Keller/Anderle LLP in Irvine, has been named to the list of “Top Women Lawyers of 2020,” as selected by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals.

This is the twelfth time Jennifer has been selected for the Top Women Lawyers award.

Class Secretaries: Joseph Curtis, 1715 Poplar Dr, Walnut Creek 94595, chfc2000@yahoo. com; Stanley and Beverly Utsumi Sugimoto, 776 Haverford Ave, Pacific Palisades 90272, ssbsssss@aol.com, bsugimoto@aol.com

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Dan Harder has published his novel, Rancho de Amor, with Berkeley publisher West Margin Press. Kirkus Review calls this debut romance “an entertaining, thoughtful take on the odd-couple romance.”

Harder is a poet, playwright, and is currently working on a libretto about the life of Paul Robeson for the Oakland Symphony.

Class Secretaries: Karl Keller, 7504 Brentwood Drive, Stockton, CA 95207; Jamie Wells Behrendt, PO Box 514, Ross, CA 94957

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Steve Carr, Ph.D., has won an Editor’s Choice Award from the journal Genome, Canada’s most prestigious genetics publication, for research on the “persistence of ancient Beothuk and Maritime Archaic mitochondrial DNA genome lineages among modern Native American peoples.” His research establishes connections between culturally extinct inhabitants of Newfoundland and modern indigenous peoples. The work was done in cooperation with the local Mi’kmaq community, the Miawpukek First Nation. Mitch Rosenberg has qualified for Top of the Table, a coveted milestone achievement for their membership in the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT). Mitch’s membership equips him with tools and resources to better serve his local community.

Class Secretary: Patrick Doyle, 5 Third St. #600, San Francisco, CA 94103. patrick. doyle@mcginleydoyle.com, 415/777-4385

associate professor emeritus by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

Class Secretary: Flora Lee, 224 Congo St., San Francisco, CA 94131, bearbum1@aol.com

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Diana Farid has published her debut trade picture book, When You Breathe. It is a timely picture book about the biology of respiration using poetry and art, published by Abrams.

Class Secretary: Eda Chao, 393 Dean St. Apt. 2B, Brooklyn, NY 11217, edachao@yahoo.com

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Pinar Karaca-Mandic co-founded the University of Minnesota COVID19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, and has been tracking hospitalizations across all states, publishing peer reviewed papers and posts, and also providing the visualization of trends and rates. The Project was able to analyze new hospital facility data from HHS and release a county-level visualization of the percentage of beds occupied by COVID19 patients for the first time in the country.

Pinar has met with the New York Times, WSJ, NBC Universal and NPR, helping their data teams work with these data as well.

Class Secretary: Heather Brown, missheatheranne@gmail.com

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Nguyen B. Pham has been appointed to Mensa Education and Research Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Nguyen joined American Mensa in 2010 and helped with annual fundraising events. “We officially raised $100,000-plus for the Foundation, and that’s astounding,” said Nguyen. “I love that I’m a part of that milestone. I share that milestone with so many incredible volunteers.”

Class Secretary: Amy Wang, 532 Treyburn Circle, San Ramon, CA 94583, yammyamy@ gmail.com

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Jeff Goodman published his debut children’s book, Feel Like Eggs?, earlier this year. Featuring playful rhymes and charming illustrations, the book is a lighthearted introduction to social-emotional learning for the little ones in your life. A former Daily Californian sports editor, Jeff was inspired to write the book—which centers around a carton of a dozen eggs, each with a different emotion—following the birth of his daughter in late 2019.

We currently have no class secretary listed for the following classes: ’29–’31, ’35, ’39, ’41, ’49, ’06 –’08, ’10, ’12–’14, and ’16–’20. If you are the class secretary, please contact the magazine office at classnotes@alumni.berkeley.edu or 510/642-5981.

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Matthew Mauldon, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been conferred the title of CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 CAL3

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

FORGET O.J. SIMPSON. The “Trial of the Century” was the Lindbergh kidnapping case in 1935, when a German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was sent to the electric chair for killing the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, arguably the most popular man on Earth.

“Lucky Lindy” had been the world’s darling ever since he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Time magazine created its first annual “Man of the Year” issue just to have an excuse to put him on the cover.

But now a book by a respected judicial scholar, The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away, argues that the real killer was none other than Lindbergh himself.

“The pretrial publicity had [Hauptmann] guilty from the

day of his arrest,” says the author, Judge Lise Pearlman, J.D. ’74.

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IT’S ALWAYS A PLEASURE to hear from one of my

favorite publicists, Janis MacKenzie ’74, because I always know she has a story that I’m going to love. But this time she wasn’t pitching me one of

her clients; it was one of her friends, Steve Mayer ’76, MBA ’87, whom she met almost 30 years ago when they were the youngest members of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce board.

“He’s the founder of the 5 Buckets 4 Shovels Foundation, which seeks to ensure that everyone has the financial tools necessary to lead a successful life,” she said. “He’s published two books on financial literacy, 5 Buckets, 4 Shovels, a Beach, and a Map: A Guide to Financial Security, which focuses on working adults, and Adulting 101: A Guide to Personal Finance, for young adults.

“But the story goes way beyond the foundation.

The real story is Steve himself and his unshakable optimism, energy, and willingness to help others.”

Janis says that despite having built one of the largest accounting firms in California, he’s not your typical CPA. “Steve is a true entrepreneur who also owns Scott’s Seafood restaurants, Café de la Presse, a catering company, and Books Inc. Some of those businesses came his way because he refused to let his clients go under, and he invested his own money to bring them back to life. He is passionate about supporting independent small businesses and claims, although I cannot independently verify, that he has never purchased anything on Amazon.”

PEARLMAN: COURTESY OF LISE PEARLMAN; MAYER: COURTESY OF STEVE MAYER

“They called him Public Enemy Number One, and when he was placed in jail awaiting trial, the state decided to have 17 guards placed outside his cell, even though he posed no threat whatsoever.”

Lise made some history herself when she graduated from Yale with the school’s first cohort of women undergraduates.

It was the first of many firsts, including first woman managing partner of an established California law firm and first presiding judge of the California State Bar Court.

After graduating from Berkeley Law (then known as Boalt Hall), she clerked for the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, followed by a year teaching law at Stanford and 13 years as a business litigator in Oakland. She’s been a private arbitrator and mediator since 1995 and chaired the Oakland Public Ethics Commission in 1998, as well as serving as president of Women Lawyers of Alameda County and a board member of California Women Lawyers.

Then she reinvented herself as the author of two awardwinning books: The Sky’s the Limit and American Justice on Trial, both about Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton’s murder trial in Oakland, which everyone expected to be a slam dunk death penalty verdict but ended up a manslaughter conviction. Newton’s lawyers, Charles Garry and Fay Stender, succeeded in impaneling a diverse jury, including a Black jury foreman.

“You’re entitled to a jury of your peers, especially in death penalty cases, but for 200 years it was always white men, especially when the defendant was a minority,” says Lise, “But they did some innovative things, like working with sociologists from Cal, which was pretty much unheard of back then, and had them testify in court about implicit bias, although they didn’t call it that.”

She also wrote a biography of movement lawyer Fay Stender, Call Me Phaedra, and coproduced two films about pioneering minority women judges and a documentary about

the Newton case, American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton.

Her principal researcher on the Lindbergh book was her daughter, Jamie Benson. “With her help, my book put in evidence that nobody else has figured out for 88 years,” Lise said. “Nobody else had put it together as a puzzle. They got parts of it, but they never got all of it.”

So what’s the evidence against Lindbergh? Like any good lawyer, Lise doesn’t try to tell the jury—or, reader—what to think. Instead, using documents and photos from the Lindbergh archives that the jury never saw, plus forensic analysis never published before, she lays it all out and lets readers come to their own conclusion. As Henry David Thoreau observed, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

JOHNSON: COURTESY OF XAVIER JOHNSON

“Only one question,” I said. “Did he ever play football for Riordan High in San Francisco?”

“Why, yes,” she replied. “How did you know?”

Elementary, my dear Janis. Remember the story I wrote about Bill Blanchard ’81, who was paralyzed from the neck down during a routine tackling drill during his senior year at Riordan? Steve was standing right next to him when it happened.

Three years ago, two of Bill’s old teammates, Dan Hayes and Dave Mahoney, were visiting when Bill revealed that he was in desperate financial straits.

He had an old, dilapidated mattress and a brokendown wheelchair that were giving him terrible bedsores, and the only way he could communicate with the outside world was by attaching a stick to his forehead so he could pound out one letter at a time on an old, obsolete laptop.

Afterwards, Dan and Dave said to each other, “We’ve got to do something!” But they didn’t know how. They needed help. That’s when they called Steve. “He said, ‘I think I can help you more than you know,’ ” remembers Dave. “And he was right.

He’s put his whole life on hold for this.”

“I’m fortunate that with my business experience, I have a pretty good idea of how to get out of the paper bag and make stuff happen,” Steve explains.

“All I had to do was walk over to a number of people who work with me and say, ‘This guy I went to high school with has been paralyzed for the last 50 years.

Can you please stop what you’re doing and do this?’ ” Steve’s chief administrative officer set up a GoFundMe that raised enough money to make Bill financially secure for the rest of his life. His assistant did all the paperwork. His marketing director helped spread the word. And his IT consultant set Bill up with a state-of-the art computer system—voiceactivated, of course. They also bought him a new, custom-fitted wheelchair and a new mattress for his bed. Sadly, Bill passed away in February of 2020.

As it happened, a week after Bill was injured the coach threw Steve off the team for sassing him.

Instantly, he was ripped away from his teammates, and best friends. “It was like getting a divorce and all your friends went with your ex-wife,” he says.

“Don’t you think it’s ironic,” said Dave, “that the guy who was thrown off the team ended up being the most valuable player?”

IF YOU WERE ANYWHERE NEAR THE STUDENT UNION

before the pandemic locked down the campus last spring, you might have noticed a young man doing some pretty impressive moves on roller skates.

Who would have guessed that only a year later he would become one of the newest members of the

most powerful elected commission in Berkeley, the Rent Stabilization Board?

His name is Xavier Johnson, J.D. ’16, and he’s been interested in tenants’ rights almost as long as he’s been roller-skating.

“It started in high school. I was doing a lot of housing policy research for debate because I just loved arguing. And it was amazing just how inequitable it was for communities of color, for people who have low income, for women, and for LGBTQ populations. So I made it my goal to go into law and policy because I saw that the decisions our elected officials made really defined the opportunities that we have in life.”

His college years were spent at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he was active in student government and worked at a law firm specializing in land use law.

“Basically, they were lobbyists for developers to get projects through at the city level. I did that work for a bit and realized that this was totally inconsistent with my values. So when I got to law school at Berkeley I spent my first summer internship at Tenants Together in San Francisco. And I’ve been doing a lot of tenants’ rights and housing-related issues ever since.”

After graduating from law school, he worked for two years for Congresswoman Barbara Lee, MSW ’75, then became a legal fellow at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland.

That’s where he struck up a friendship with Leah SimonWeisberg, and four years ago he helped manage her successful campaign for the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board. She ran for re-election last fall and asked him to join her five-person slate, which was competing against one backed by property owner groups.

He brought a lot to the slate beyond his experience. As a member of the African American and queer communities, he was able to reach out to both populations for support.

It was David vs. Goliath all over again. Xavier only had about $7,000 to spend on his campaign; the other side spent $130,000.

And with the election taking place in the midst of a pandemic, door-to-door campaigning was severely curtailed.

When the votes were counted, the tenants’ slate had swept all five seats. Simon-Weisberg finished first with 31,924 votes, and Xavier came in a strong second with 29,995.

And what’s first on his agenda for the Rent Board?

“I want to work on allowing tenants to have sub-tenants in their apartments. Because of the pandemic, so many people have lost their income and their ability to pay rent. To me, it just seems the right thing.”

And, yes, he plans to resume roller-skating as soon as the lockdown is lifted.

Reach Martin Snapp at catman442@comcast.net.

CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 CAL5

In Memoriam

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Margaret Ann (Shower) Watson, M.S.W. ’66, Dec. 7, in St. Helena. At Berkeley, Margaret was a cartoonist for the Daily Cal and Pelican, designed card stunts for football games, and was one of two student speakers at graduation. Twenty years later she returned to get her master’s in social work. In the ’80s, she worked for Berkeley on the implementation of Title IX and then served in the Carter administration. She returned to California to serve as the Director of Housing for the City and County of Napa.

She is survived by her husband, James ’48; three children; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

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Arthur F. Okuno, M.S. ’49, Nov. 25. Art was an Eagle Scout whose mechanical engineering studies were interrupted by wartime internment at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming and enlistment in the U.S. Army. Upon honorable discharge, Art returned to Berkeley to complete his degrees, then moved to Virginia as an aeronautical engineer. He later made his family’s home in Saratoga and worked for NASA on the first space shuttle. He was a devoted husband and father whose interests included community involvement, research, backpacking, travel, and Cal sports. He is survived by his wife, Aki; four children, Ken ’77, Satoshi, Tadashi ’82, Akemi; and four grandchildren.

Glenn Boom, Sept. 30, in Fairhope, AL. Born in Wheatland, Glenn joined the NROTC at Cal. After graduation, he served on the aircraft carrier Tarawa in the Far East. Upon returning, Glenn joined Shell Oil Company, met and married Sally Streeter ’52 and, shortly after, was recalled to active duty during the Korean Conflict. He served on the submarine Pickerel in Pearl Harbor, HI before resuming his career at Shell, where he worked for 31 years.

He continued with the Naval Reserve for 31 years, retiring as captain. He had a second career as president of Delta Oil Company on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. He was active in community affairs, loved sailing, and traveled with Sally and his family. He is survived by his wife of 69 years; two sons; two daughters; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

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Harold A. “Hal” Hyde, Oct. 12, in Santa Cruz. Hal was a freshman when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He served with the U.S. Army in Europe and later the Philippines before graduating. He continued in the Army Reserve, retiring in 1983 as brigadier general.

Hal was a businessman who played a major

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role in the development of Cabrillo Community College and was the first Vice Chancellor, Business and Finance, for UC Santa Cruz. He was a proud second-generation Cal grad, following his father Harold Sr. ’17, and a member of Sigma Phi fraternity and Order of the Golden Bear. He vacationed at the Lair, attended most Big Games, and held out eternal hope for one more trip to the Rose Bowl.

Hal is survived by Dorothy Puckett Hyde ’46; four children; and three grandchildren.

Donald Nesbit, Jan. 2. Don completed a tour of duty in the Navy, then graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in business administration. There, he met his soulmate, Mary, with whom he spent over 50 years of marriage before Mary’s passing in 2002. He was also a lifelong participant and supporter of Cal’s aquatic program. He worked as an administrator for Kaiser Permanente for approximately 40 years, overseeing four local hospitals. Upon Don’s retirement, he and Mary began traveling in earnest, from Santorini to Beijing, making friends at every port. Don is survived by sons, Don Jr. and Scott; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

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Lloyd Hanford, Jr., Nov. 25, in Rancho Mirage. After graduating and serving in the Army, he began a 60-year career in real estate, including as an owner of Hanford-Freund & Company. He served as president of the Institute of Real Estate Management and authored several articles in professional journals. A longtime member of the Guardsmen, he helped “at risk” youth and forged many friendships. Lloyd and his wife, Noel, went on more than 50 cruises together. He also enjoyed tennis, skiing, golf, and bridge. He was predeceased by his parents and sister, Louise. Lloyd is survived by his wife, Noel; his sons, Tim and John; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

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Edward Bates, July 31, in Santa Cruz.

Ed enlisted in the Navy on his 17th birthday, just shy of completing high school.

He served as a quartermaster aboard a variety of vessels, including a fleet tug and the submarine USS Razorback. Upon his discharge from active duty, he obtained his high school diploma and earned a degree in geology. He also met Navy (WAVE) veteran Betty Scannell, with whom he would spend 70+ years and raise three children: Mary, Mike, and Anna.

His geology career took them around rural California and Wyoming, before Ed and Betty

settled in Los Banos where he began a career in education. Ed earned his M.A. and Administrative Services credential, before becoming the Milpitas Assistant Superintendent and later District Superintendent of Schools, a position he held for 15 years. Ed took many annual trips to the Lair and served as a Deacon at the Santa Cruz Disciples of Christ Church. He is survived by nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

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Ronald Robinson O.D., Nov 11, in San Leandro. Born in Calgary in 1927, Ron played ice hockey for the Bears from 1948-1950. Ron attended the UC School of Optometry and practiced in San Francisco until 1999. He is survived by two children and four grandchildren.

Marguerite Ray, Nov. 18, in Los Angeles.

Actress and social advocate, Marguerite was best known for the roles of Mamie Johnson on The Young and the Restless, Evelyn Lewis on Sanford and Son, and Jane Matthews on Dynasty. Born in New Orleans, she earned a B.A in recreation and theater arts. She served as the recreation and entertainment director with the U.S. Special Services in Germany and helped form The Aldridge Players-West, an acting group that performed in San Francisco and toured HBCU s. She served on Boards of several advocacy groups, including The Actors Fund, Kwanza Foundation, and Jenesse Center. Marguerite was preceded in death by her parents; sister, Verna; and brothers, Walter, Ronald, Henry, and Burt. She is survived by her sister, Jacqueline; sister-inlaw, Cynthia; and her extended family and special circle of friends.

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John Holleman, M.A. ’58, Dec. 17, in Stockton. John studied zoology at Cal and received his Ed.D. from Nova University. He taught biology and marine biology at Merritt College in Oakland for 20 years and was president of Vista College (now Berkeley City College) for 9 years. John served as president of Gavilan College in Gilroy, developing an interest in viticulture and agriculture. Upon retirement, he and his wife, Nancy Bracken ’55, moved to Danville and later Calaveras County where they grew premium zinfandel grapes. John continued his research in marine biology and was a research associate at San Francisco’s California Academy of Science. He is survived by his wife of 65 years, Nancy; his brother, David; three children; ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Hershel Z. Herzberg, Nov. 20. Hershel served in Germany with the U.S. Army ’s 287th Field Artillery Unit and later the U.S. Army Reserves. He joined the first volunteer group of the Peace Corps in 1961 and taught high school history, English, and literature in Nigeria. He met volunteer Dorothy Crews, and they married and had three children.

Hershel received his B.A. in political science and an educational credential from Cal and his M.A. in history from San Francisco State. His teaching career in the San Mateo County School District spanned almost 50 years at Crestmoor and Capuchino High Schools where he taught world history, geography, government, and economics. Hershel enjoyed eating out at Chinese restaurants, watching Warriors games, participating in singalongs, and attending Peninsula Sinai Congregation services with his family. Hershel is survived by his three children, Samuel, Laura, and Daniel; four grandchildren; and his niece and nephews.

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Lawrence W. Connelly, Jan. 6, in Palos Verdes. Larry’s fondest memories at Cal were with his Sigma Pi fraternity brothers and a road trip to cheer on the Bears in the ’59 Rose Bowl. Yet his luckiest moment was when he was set up with a girl from Stern Hall named Helen. They married a year later, and moved to Southern California, where Larry started his commercial glass business and a family. For decades, the highlight of every summer was spending a week at the Lair of the Golden Bear. Larry was a family man who loved to laugh and found gratitude in every situation. ‘Lucky us’ was a phrase he and his wife would say to each other daily. He is survived by his wife, Helen (Rubin) ’61; two children; and four granddaughters.

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Dave Redo, Nov, 23. Dave studied electrical engineering and computer science. He was a principal at Wetherby Asset Management, a retired managing director and board member of the Fremont Group, and a retired director of J.P. Morgan Securities-Asia, the World Trade Club, and Sequoia Ventures. Dave was a Bear Backer, a Berkeley Fellow, a member of the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Society, and a founding member of the Cal Performances Board. His beloved wife, Judy, ’62 was by his side when he passed, following a decade-long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

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Lay Nam Chang, Ph.D. ’67, Dec. 15.

Lay earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics. He conducted research at MIT and the University of Chicago and served as a visiting scientist at universities in the U.S. and abroad, including Stanford and Fermilab. He joined the Virginia Tech Department of Physics faculty, later serving as department chair until 2002 when he was appointed dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Lay served on review panels for the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Jeannie, and daughter, Ch’iu Lien Chang.

Anne-Louise Guichard Radimsky, Ph.D. ’73, July 2, in Sacramento. Dr. Radimsky was an

IT pioneer and one of the first wave of female Ph.D.s in Electrical Engineering at Berkeley.

She retired as a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science Engineering at California State University, Sacramento and a member of the ABET Committee, which accredits international engineering departments. She is survived by her husband, Jan Radimsky ’70, and two daughters.

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Robert Keller, Ph.D. ’70, Sept. 13, in Claremont. After receiving his Ph.D in EECS, Bob held faculty positions at Princeton University, the University of Utah, UC Davis, and Harvey Mudd College, where he became the first chair of the new computer science department. He coached HMC’s team to victory in the ACM International Programming Contest world finals in 1997. Alongside courses ranging from artificial intelligence to computability and logic, he also ran a jazz improvisation class for Claremont Colleges students. In 2006, he released the free opensource software Impro-Visor, which analyzes a musician’s solo playing. He is survived by his wife, Noel, and sons, Franz and Patrick ’02.

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Linda Frazee Baker, Ph.D. ’74, Sept.

2, in Arnold, MD. Linda received her Ph.D. in English. She was a New York-based literary translator in the decade following her retirement as a senior evaluator for the U.S. Government Accountability Office. She is survived by her husband, Michael Replogle; four children, Matthew ’06, Christopher, Mara, and Eric; and four grandchildren. Donations are invited to UCal’s Achievement Award Program in Linda’s honor.

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William J. Rorabaugh, Ph.D. ’76, in Seattle, WA. Born in Louisville, KY, Bill received his Ph.D. in history. He became a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and was recognized as a fellow of the Newberry Library, Huntington Library, Kennedy Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. He authored several scholarly articles and six books, from his first, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition to his most recent American Hippies. Bill enjoyed photography, travel, films, and politics. He is survived by his siblings, James and Mary, and extended family.

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Eric Tomich, May 27, in Dubai, UAE. Eric earned his B.A. in architecture.

His career in architecture spanned decades and continents, with notable projects including the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. Eric’s contribution to the profession was recognized with a Fellowship of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) in 2018.

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Mark McNamara, April 27. Mark studied political economy at Cal,

where he played basketball for two seasons.

After graduating, he was chosen 22nd overall in the first round of the NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers. In his first season, Mark led the 76ers to an NBA Championship. During his decade-long professional basketball career, he played for the San Antonio Spurs, Kansas City Kings, Los Angeles Lakers, and Orlando Magic. Mark was named one of 30 players on the 2009 Golden Bears All-Century team. In 2016, he was inducted into the Cal Athletic Hall of Fame.

Susan Landauer, Nov. 19. Susan was a leading historian and curator of California art. She studied Chinese and Japanese art at Cal and was awarded the History of Art Department Citation for Outstanding Achievement. As a Ph.D. student at Yale, she shifted to American and Western art, focusing on the 1940s and ’50s San Francisco abstract expressionists.

She authored three books with the University of California Press and spent 10 years as the chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art.

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Kevin R. Montoya, Jan. 31, in San Francisco. After graduating with a B.A. in economics, Kevin worked as a wealth advisor for Dean Whitter-Morgan Stanley, eventually rising to senior vice president.

A member of Theta Delta Chi, Kevin and other alumni helped fund renovations to their iconic ivy-covered house on the corner of College and Durant. A proud member of the Lagunas, the Pueblo Indians of Laguna in Seama, NM, Kevin is survived by his wife, Nicole; son, Robert; and daughter, Katherine.

22

Nadeem Farooqi, Dec. 4, in Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley for his MBA, Nadeem, who suffered from bipolar schizophrenia, devoted himself to making mental health services more widely accessible. A deep and compassionate thinker, Nadeem’s family remembers one of his more singular shibboleths: “Let’s laugh, cry, and think of how to make the world better.”

23

Ivan Stepkin, Nov 22. Ivan was an undergraduate student studying psychology and molecular cell biology in the College of Letters & Science. He was expected to graduate in 2023.

FACULTY AND STAFF William Clemens, ’54, Ph.D. ’60, Nov. 17, in Berkeley. A legend in the field of paleontology, Bill first became interested in fossils at the family’s Wyoming homestead, where old bones and rock dotted the sloping hillsides.

After graduating from Berkeley High, Bill attended Berkeley and began work at the Museum of Paleontology. Upon graduating, he served with the U.S. army in Germany. He brought along his wife, Dorothy “Dot” Thelen Clemens ’55. After two years he returned CALIFORNIA SPRING 2021 CAL7

to Berkeley as a graduate student, studying fossils in Wyoming to understand mammal diversity during the Cretaceous period. This work led to his controversial, but ultimately correct pushback against the “impact hypothesis” of an entirely asteroid-caused dinosaur extinction. After teaching at the University of Kansas, Clemens returned to Cal, where he chaired the department and served as director of the Museum of Paleontology. Bill retired as a professor emeritus of integrative biology in 2002 but continued to research fossils until his passing. He was predeceased by Dorothy after 60+ years of marriage. He is survived by his children, Catherine, Elisabeth, Diane, and William, and seven grandchildren.

Stephen Booth, Nov. 25. A beloved Shakespeare scholar, Stephen was a professor emeritus of English literature at Cal. He studied at Cambridge University in England, where he was a Marshall Scholar before earning his Ph.D. at Harvard. He was awarded an NEH Fellowship and served as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1970-71. At Cal, he won the 1982 Distinguished Teaching Award. He received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Georgetown University and, in 1995, the Order of the British Empire. Stephen authored many essays, papers, and books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Edited with Analytic Commentary, for which he won the 1977 James Russell Lowell Prize and the 1978 Explicator Prize. He is survived by his daughter, Mary; son-in-law, Nathan; and dear friend, Joan.

Robert Pruger, Dec. 5. Robert joined the faculty of Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare during the Nixon-era. He helped formalize the relatively new and informal field of welfare research with concepts from economics, sociology, and political science. His research focused primarily on social policy analysis and organization theory. He was also interested in the efficiency of social services, publishing a book, Controversial Issues in Social Work Practice, in 1991.

George Strauss, Nov. 28, in Berkeley. George was a professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business, where he taught for 30 years and received the prestigious University Citation. George earned his Ph.D. in economics from MIT and served as a visiting professor and scholar at universities across the U.S., Europe, and Australia. He was a prolific author, publishing a textbook, 12 books, and more than 150 journal articles. George was the director of the Institute of Industrial Relations (now the Institute for Research on Labor & Employment) and edited the journal Industrial Relations for many years. George enjoyed hiking, visiting museums, and throwing lavish faculty parties with his wife. He also volunteered in several capacities with the “Berkeley Co-op.” George was predeceased CAL8 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

by his wife, Helene, after 55 years of marriage.

He is survived by his daughters, Emilie and Elizabeth, and his sister, Miriam.

Michael Williams, Jan. 2. Michael was a respected professor and researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. After receiving his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, he joined the Berkeley faculty, where he worked on polymer rheology.

Michael received the Distinguished Teaching Award and, over the course of his career, published more than 150 research publications and lectured internationally. Michael was an avid traveler and devoted sports fan. He was preceded in death by his parents, Orla and James, and his younger brother, Brian. He is survived by his dear friend, Monica; four children, David, Elizabeth, Marie, and Stephen; former wife, Judith; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Ralph Kramer, ’42, M.S.W. ’46, D.S.W. ’64, Dec. 29, in Danville. Ralph was a professor emeritus in Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in social work. He married Hadassah Goldberg, whom he met at Berkeley Hillel, and who joined him in Texas where he served as a social worker in the U.S. Air Force and Army. After completing his M.S.W., he worked for the Jewish Committee for Personal Service, counseling Jewish inmates at San Quentin Prison. He served as the assistant director of the East Bay Jewish Federation before entering Cal’s inaugural doctoral program in social welfare and later joining the faculty. Ralph enjoyed playing clarinet and will be remembered for his brilliance, humor, and wit. He was preceded in death by his wife, Hadassah, and his daughter, Debby. He is survived by two daughters, Miriam and Alisa; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Leo Goodman, Dec. 22. Born to Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants, Leo was a professor emeritus of statistics and sociology and considered a “giant in his field.” He earned his undergraduate degree from Syracuse University and his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton before serving as a professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Chicago for 36 years. He joined the Cal faculty in 1986 and retired in 2017. According to a Berkeley sociology newsletter, Leo worked under several Jewish scholars who had fled from the Nazis.

He is remembered for his generosity, joyful personality, and patience as a professor, father, and friend. He is survived by his two sons, Tom and Andy; sister, Janice; former wife, Ann; and five grandchildren.

Alaa Mansour, Ph.D. ’66, Jan. 1, in Tiburon.

Born in Egypt, Alaa, a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, received his B.S.

from University of Cairo before completing his Ph.D. in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at Cal. Alaa was a founding editor of the Journal of Marine Structures for North and South America and was an editor of the Journal of Marine Science and Technology. He served as the chair of the International Ship and Offshore Structures Congress, and later as a U.S. representative to the Congress. Alaa became a fellow of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree by the Technical University of Denmark for his “significant contributions to development of design criteria for ships and offshore structures.”

Joseph Myers, Dec. 29. A Pomo Indian of Northern California, Joseph graduated from Berkeley Law and later served as an ethnic studies and Native American studies lecturer at Cal. For 29 years, he shared his cultural wisdom and vast knowledge of federal Indian law with the Cal community. Joseph was the first known California Indian to join the California Highway Patrol. A champion of Indigenous rights, he was the founder and executive director of the National Indian Justice Center (NIJC) —a resource for tribal governments and their courts—and board president of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center (CIMCC). In 2002, he was awarded the California Peace Prize for his work in violence prevention on Indian reservations, and later received the Peter E. Haas Public Service Award. The Joseph A. Myers Center, housed in Cal’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), was named in his honor. He is survived by Dixie, his loving and devoted wife of 51 years; seven children, eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

For In Memoriam guidelines, please visit alumni.berkeley.edu/California/guidelines. asp. We strongly prefer that you email submissions to californiamag@alumni. berkeley.edu with “Obituary: first name, last name, class year” in the subject line, but you also can 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: Summer 2021 issue: April 10 Fall 2021 issue: July 2

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IN HOUSE

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Leadership Award Scholars at the 35th Annual Leadership Award Recognition Luncheon on March 2, 2020, one week before remote instruction would begin at Berkeley.

I write this after watching the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States and the swearing-in of the first female and Black vice president.

Though still operating at physical distances from one another, we, in many ways, have grown closer together through the shared experiences of life during a pandemic, social unrest, and the transition of leadership in our nation’s capital. We have been able to reassert who we are as a people and what our country stands for.

We celebrate our mutual respect for each other, embracing our differences, finding ways to create more inclusive spaces for Cal alumni and students to connect with each other and the world around us.

The Cal Alumni Association (CAA) reflects on the best of what UC Berkeley instilled in us. CAA’s work transcends income, race, and gender. Our alumni established The Leadership Award in 1934. The one-year, merit-based scholarship brings together undergraduate students at Cal who demonstrate innovative, initiative-driven leadership with an impact. We ask each of them, “How are you going to make your mark at UC Berkeley?” and prepare them to continue to lead in their fields and local communities after graduation.

The destructive events of January 6, 2021 will forever be part of our history. Yet just two weeks later at the United States Capitol, a Black woman was sworn in by a Latina Supreme Court justice.

58 ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU

Reflect on that for a moment. A daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, who immersed themselves in the democratic process right here in Berkeley, is now the vice president of the United States.

Last fall, the campus welcomed its most ethnically diverse incoming class. I thought of them as I watched Vice President Kamala Harris complete the swearing-in ceremonies for Senators Alex Padilla, Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff. Our students are able to see that these powerful positions are no longer exclusive; they are part of their continuous leadership journeys.

As we begin to heal after a tumultuous 2020, I found these words from Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, both comforting and inspiring: “But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust. For while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.”

Fiat Lux.

Executive Director Clothilde Hewlett ’76, J.D. ’79 CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

Images: CJ Poloka of Charles Poloka Photography; courtesy of Daniel Muñoz; courtesy of Anara Myrzabekova

DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

Your Yourconnection connectionto toBerkeley.

Berkeley.For ForLife. life.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES ON THE ROAD TO CAL A DAY IN THE LIVES OF ALUMNI SCHOLARS DANIEL MUÑOZ AND ANARA MYRZABEKOVA

by Sasha Kolesnikov

Anara Myrzabekova

Danny with his “old school” car, a 1964 Chevy Impala.

The

Cal Alumni Association’s one-year, merit based scholarship, The Leadership Award (TLA), recognizes undergraduate students at UC Berkeley who demonstrate innovative, initiative-driven leadership impacting their academic, work, or community environments.

We talked to two recipients of this year’s TLA scholarship, Daniel (Danny) Muñoz ’22 and Anara Myrzabekova ’22, about their journeys to Cal.

Daniel (Danny) Muñoz

After being shot five times in relation to gang violence in 2016, Danny decided to enroll in Chabot Community College, found a passion for sociology, gave the keynote address at Chabot’s Commencement Ceremony as an honors student, and transferred to Cal in 2020.

To get ready for a day of classes and meetings, Danny takes a walk around his block before cracking open a Monster energy drink. He is currently taking classes in sociology and public policy, in addition to being a George A. Miller Scholar. “My research, which I want to carry throughout my time at Berkeley and hopefully through a PhD program, is about how teacher-student interactions influence children’s trajectories.”

Having grown up in a disadvantaged family in Oakland and San Leandro, Danny seeks to use his background and education to give back by ultimately opening an organization that caters to at-risk youth. “I kind of fell victim to my surroundings and went through the wringer with legal and societal issues that I thought I was destined for. There wasn’t a lot in terms of guidance for me. I wanted to focus my work on youth because I thought a lot about how the problems in my community stem from early experiences in life.” Already actively involved in community service, Danny works as a transfer coordinator for Berkeley Underground Scholars, an academicsupport program at Cal that is building a “prison-to-school pipeline.”

With class ending at 6 p.m., Danny spends the rest of the evening unwinding by watching TV, working on his music, and spending time in his kids’ lives. “I have two boys that I see regularly and I try to give them what I didn’t have and stay involved in their lives.” Danny has always enjoyed making music: “My music is getting lighter from when I was gang-involved as time progresses. It’s something about getting aggression out from past experiences and even from stress and frustration in current life.” As a first-generation student, father of six, and a TLA and Achievement Award Program Scholar, Danny feels supported at Cal: “The CAA program staff and Cal alumni I’ve interacted with have been very inclusive of who I am, and I have nothing but love for them.”

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION CONTENT

Initially immigrating to Alabama from Kyrgyzstan by herself at 18, Anara became a leader in her community college’s honor society before finding her way to Cal as a junior transfer in 2020.

Anara starts her mornings at 5 a.m. by making a list of the day’s tasks and preparing her son for daycare. With class starting at 10 a.m., she spends the afternoon attending lectures, doing homework, and working on extracurricular projects. Despite feeling the effects of imposter syndrome as a result of the stigma against women in STEM in her home country, Anara is studying data science in hopes of “becoming an expert in the field and working in tech.”

She is already making these goals a reality through her involvement as a Fung Fellow and a New Face of Tech Scholarship Program recipient, through which she receives funding and mentorship from a Berkeley data-science alum. As a fellow in Berkeley’s Fung Institute Fellowship Program, Anara aims to “grow as a leader and innovate a design for social good.” She discussed her health-related semester project: “The project I presented was about social isolation. We partnered with UC Berkeley to interview students and find out the major issues that they were currently experiencing.”

In the evenings, Anara picks up her son from daycare, prepares dinner, and finishes any outstanding work. “I think it’s challenging to be a mom and also be a student. For example, my baby turned two on December 7, but I couldn't celebrate his birthday because I had finals.” Still, Anara’s family and goals are what motivate her: “A big motivation is my baby, and he motivates me without knowing it.” Embodying the values of the TLA scholarship, Anara hopes to use her experiences and studies to not only “become a role model for women and other minorities in STEM,” but to “make [her] family proud and provide a better future for [her] son.”

“I had a really good experience when talking to Cal alumni during my interview,” Anara reflects. “I found out that when they were looking at me, they were looking at themselves when they were younger. So I was imagining myself being one of them and interviewing someone when I’m an alum.”

Anara and her husband, Arafat, celebrating her Cal acceptance letter on April 17th, 2020.

Hear more from Danny and Anara at bit.ly/TLAstories.

Sasha Kolesnikov is a sophomore at Cal double majoring in political science and society and environment. She is interested in the intersection of socially responsible business, politics, and law. She is a current Alumni Scholar in The Achievement Award Program and a student assistant at the Cal Alumni Association.

ALUMNI.BERKELEY.EDU 59

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

Ernst S. Valfer ’50, M.S ’52, Ph.D. ’65 Willard J. Classen, Jr. ’51, M.A. ’53 Patricia Crow Payson ’51 Murray B. Gardner ’51, M.D. Lawrence R. Halling ’52 Alvin L. Huie ’53 Diane M. Elliott ’55 Kathryn W. Atkinson ’56 Paul Nordin ’56, M.A. ’57, Ph.D. ’61 Rose M. Towns M.L.S. ’56 Capt. John T. Andrews ’57, USCG (Ret.) Mae Y. Ferral ’59 Timothy F. Oberholtzer ’59

Paul L. Erlich M.A ’68 Harriett Fernstrom M.P.H. ’68, R.D. Dennis R. Mar ’68 Christine P. Rozance ’68, M.D. Michael G. Sonnleitner ’68, O.D. ’70 Ann K. Thompson ’68 Phyllis A. Wilson ’68, D.P.H. Radhakrishnan J. Aiyar Ph.D. ’69 Michael S. Averell ’69 Dr. Abraham Bromberg ’69 Michele J. Chabot ’69 Sandra Froisland Fox-Sohner ’69, MBA ’89 Steven E. Harrold ’69 Steven R. Kimberlin M.S. ’69 Kathleen K. Nakase ’69 Toni M. Perazzo ’69 Michele G. Pickens ’69 Dean M. Suzuki MBA ’69

1960s

Walter A. Glooschenko ’60, Ph.D. Sharon D. Godske ’60 Betty H. Herbert ’60 Robert L. Mills ’60 Norman A. Payne ’60 Peter L. Sanford ’61 Robert H. Anderson ’62 Barbara M. Ferrigno ’62 Melvin J. Kaplan ’62 Akiko Y. Makishima ’62 Leonard B. Perrone ’62 Louisa B. Tabatabai ’62, Ph.D. Melvin L. Kazarian ’63, M.S. ’64 Albert H. Kramer ’63, M.A. ’64 Joseph Morris ’63 Jane C. Sherwood ’63 Arlene J. Bernstein ’64 Judith L. Biggs ’64 Alfred Phillip Gonzales ’64 Allan H. Lerch ’64 Stephen L. Rice ’64, M.S. ’69, Ph.D. ’72 Kent K. Young ’64 Professor Michael A. Anker ’65 Norman J. Buettner ’65 Barbara M. Hughes ’65 Jo Anne Harbour Jones ’65 Walter E. Sykes M.S. ’65 Barbara A. Bennett ’66 Seth Freeman ’66 Jon S. Galehouse Ph.D. ’66 Michael A. Mosher ’66 Dr. William R. Safarjan ’66 Sharon N. Snowiss ’66 Thomas B. Timar ’66, Ph.D. ’86 Daniel Visnich M.J. ’66 Hervé J. Gallaire M.S. ’67, Ph.D. ’68 Joseph R. Goglio, Jr. ’67 Stanley R. Keil ’67, Ph.D. James B. Orton ’67 Fay M. Playsted ’67 Jerald A. Smith ’67 Norma M. Vance ’67, M.L.S. ’68 John A. Baker, Jr. ’68, M.S. ’73

1970s Brock S. Allen ’70, M.A. ’74, M.Ed. ’74 Wanda L. Gallerson ’70 David M. Jinkens ’70, M.P.A. Nita B. Lederman ’70 Thomas W. Leonhardt ’70, M.L.S. ’73 Ann S. Magid ’70 Ed White ’70 Madeline M. Allen ’71 Lucille Lang Day ’71, M.A. ’73, Ph.D. ’79 Fred Gusman ’71 Anne T. Hetland J.D. ’71 Paul P. Mesple ’71 Timm A. Slater ’71 Heather A. Bracken ’72 Carl P. Deuker ’72 Stephen L. Felgar ’72 Vladimir R. Grave ’72 Kenneth Leong ’72 James L. Mannos Ph.D. ’72 Margaret C. Martini ’72 Colin L. McMaster ’72, M.S. ’74 Phuong M. Nguyen-Le ’72 Ann L. Pfaff-Doss M.A. ’72 Leonard J. Richards ’72 Maj. John M. Spade ’72, USAF Margot R. Tobias ’72, M.S. Lawrence Wong ’72 Robert A. Mayer ’73 Alan P. Newman ’73, M.D. Barbara Carol Brass ’74 Dr. Karin G. Hu ’74 Trinidad H. Juarez ’74 Walter Y. Menda ’74 Jean M. Perata ’74 Raymond J. Shu ’74 D. Kent Stewart ’74 Yuk Lun Tsang’74 Arthur P. Wong ’74

Dorothy Wong ’74 John A. Coakley ’75 Catherine L. Less ’75 Jane C.S. Long M.S. ’75, Ph.D. ’83 Nancy C. Mulvany ’75 Peggy Woon ’75 Duncan A. Lewis ’76 Carla D. Clements ’77 Patricia L. Friesen ’77 Gary T. Ino ’77 Redge A. Martin MBA ’77 Paul L. Pereira ’77 Jonathan G. Price Ph.D. ’77 Mitchell I. Richman ’77 Pauline T. Valha ’77 Frank G. Evans ’78 Yoshikuni Hirayama M.Eng. ’78 Alan H. Hirotani ’78 Thomas W. Kruckewitt ’78 Nellie C. Lai ’78 Daniel Merer ’78 Bruce J. Sabacky Ph.D. ’78 William C. Barbagallo ’79 Stan E. Beckers Ph.D. ’79 Stephen A. Blum ’79 Janis L. Bultman ’79 Andrew J. Demetriou J.D. ’79 George A. Freitas ’79 Bruce A. Ingraham ’79, M.A. ’87 Peter Sally ’79, PE

1980s James E. Bittle M.S. ’80, PE Diana L. Powell J.D. ’80 Dr. Scott L. Charland ’81 Gayle Lynne Coleman ’81 James R. Bonde ’83 Laurie M. Earl ’83 Denise Quackenbush ’83 Gary W. Reichhold ’83 Neal I. Taniguchi ’83, M.P.P. ’85 Nicolai W. Anikouchine ’84 Leonard Derk Perez ’84 Professor Jay E. Gillette Ph.D. ’85 Gregory J. Di Peso ’85, M.S. ’86, Ph.D. ’91 Nancy A. Fong ’86 Kent K. Fung ’86 Richard C. Worden ’86 Daniel E. Hassler ’87 Chinh H. Pham ’87 James Michael Rose ’87 Eugene S. Wan ’87 Sabrina C. Hwu ’88 Max H. Choi ’89 Jacqueline L. Hendrix ’89 Jennifer K. Pais ’89

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1990s Monica J. Abruzzo ’90 Staci L. Fournier ’90 Freya White-Henry Ph.D. ’90 Douglas D. Hammer ’91 Dinesh Govindarao ’92 Claudia J. Rice ’93 Bernice P. Lee ’94 Lance Held ’95 Elaine H. Sir ’95 Agnes Chang ’96 Manuel J. de Vera, Jr. ’97 Amy C. Ainscough ’98 Patricia L. Rivera ’98 Fayez M. Khan M.S. ’99

2000s Aman H. Shah ’00 Edward C. Tu J.D. ’00 Thomas W. Birbeck ’01 Jate Samathivathanachai ’01 Rosie I. Hernandez ‘02, M.S.W. ’04 Loida M. Valentin ’03 Marc A. Brandt ’04 Robert G. Kelly, III MBA ’04 Robert G. Hennessy ’05 Joseph M. Morales M.A. ’05, Ph.D. ’12 Serena Sah ’05 Laurene S. Cheung ’06 Linda L. McDonald ’08 Robert R. Lamorena ’09 Amy Thai ’09

2010s Heather Yang ’10 Jinnie Choi Ph.D. ’13 Glendan J. T. Lawler ’13 Jillian A. Wertheim ’13 Angeli O. Kirk M.S. ’14, Ph.D. ’16 Raylene Chew ’17 Justin R. Chiang ’17

2020s Aaron Espinoza ’20 Christopher Michael J. Rojas Moreno ’20

Friends of the University David Dahler Patti F. Lew H. Scott Thompson

IN HOUSE

Images: Frey Gardens / Claire Kremen, Berkeley Food Institute; Courtesy of Nina Ichikawa

CAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

For Nina Ichikawa ’00, Agriculture Is More than Farming—It’s Life

The Berkeley Food Institute expands access to healthy, affordable food.

People of Japanese descent have a long history in the Bay Area—long enough that many consider themselves as American as they are Japanese. Fourth-generation Japanese American Nina Ichikawa ’00 makes that same assertion. Her family has been in the US since the late 19th century when they settled in Richmond.

Ichikawa is an agriculture activist, the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute, and part of the Japanese American Women Alumnae of UC Berkeley (JAWAUCB). Cal was one of the first UC campuses to

Agriculture activist and Berkeley Food Institute Executive Director Nina Ichikawa

continued on page 62 >>

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“ It was a great story because it symbolized how we turned adversity into mutual aid and helped the next generation of Japanese American women succeed at Cal.” admit Japanese students in the 1930s. Those students bought a clubhouse that became a dorm for those who could not find housing because of racial discrimination. Today, JAWAUCB works with the university to support Asian and Japanese American women on campus. “It was a great story because it symbolized how we turned adversity into mutual aid and helped the next generation of Japanese American women succeed at Cal.”

Ichikawa can trace her family’s history through changes in California agriculture. “They started a farming business in Richmond and raised five kids, the oldest of whom was my grandmother, Elsie Ogata,” who graduated from Cal in 1939 and was a JAWAUCB member. After settling in Contra Costa County, her family opened a flower shop. Then, World War II happened, uprooting her family.

After the war, Ichikawa’s family stayed in the Bay Area, but changes in government policy made it difficult for them to stay in business, which they did until 2017, when after 112 years, they closed the shop. “Conditions have changed a lot over the years for American farmers. For us, NAFTA was a big gamechanger,” she says. The domestic market was flooded with cheap flowers from South America, and farmers were encouraged to export high-value flowers instead of food crops. Having witnessed this change firsthand, she understands the current struggles of farm workers.

As a transfer student and interdisciplinary studies major, Ichikawa worked with REACH (Asian and Pacific Islander Recruitment and Retention Center) to recruit underrepresented students to Cal and promote diversity on campus. In her classes, she examined the legacy

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of Asian American farmers after the war. “I just started to look around and became very concerned about how inequality expresses itself in food and farming.” Almost everything we need in life comes from agriculture: clothes, wood, and most notably, food production. However, this does not register when we have our coffee or go out for dinner. At the Berkeley Food Institute, Ichikawa connects the dots between agriculture and life: “Without agriculture, you have no Michelin star restaurants, just like without cotton fields, you have no Milan Fashion Week.”

In working to raise awareness of the food system, she seeks to democratize it. Under the Obama administration, she worked on the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, an initiative that rebuilds local and regional systems. “Our food system has become very consolidated and multinational over the past few decades, and that created certain vulnerabilities.”

Although there is a lot of work to be done, Ichikawa is grateful that journalists are calling out violations at farms and that in the midst of a pandemic, people want to know more about their food: “People have gotten very excited about farmers markets because of the ability to talk to farmers and have a visceral experience.”

Spotlight

Former governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm ’84, will forge a path toward a net-zerocarbon future as the new U.S. secretary of energy under President Joe Biden, a role formerly held by her fellow Berkeley alum and Nobel laureate Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, who led the department under the Obama administration. In her two terms as Michigan’s first female governor (2003-2011), Granholm focused on revamping the state’s auto industry by sourcing clean energy. After Lansing, she returned to Cal to join the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) as a senior research fellow. In 2014, CAA honored Granholm with its Excellence in Achievement Award.

64 CALIFORNIAMAG.ORG

As the new director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Julie Chávez Rodriguez ’00 will serve as President Biden’s liaison with local, tribal, county, and state governments.

A longtime political activist, Rodriguez was influenced by her grandfather, Chicano labor leader Cesar Chávez. Rodriguez worked full-time for both the Obama 2008 and Harris 2020 presidential campaigns and from 2011 to 2017 served at the White House Office of Public Engagement, where she managed outreach to minority ethnic, religious, and political groups, as well as veterans and the LGBT community. She is reportedly the highestranking Latina in the Biden administration.

On January 26, 2021, Kamala Harris, the first female vice president of the United States, swore in Berkeley Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen as the nation’s first female secretary of the treasury. The former Federal Reserve chair (2014-2018) will have her work cut out for her as the country confronts a growing, pandemic-fueled economic crisis. Shortly after taking her oath, Yellen, who spent more than two decades teaching at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, took to Twitter.

“Economics isn’t just something you find in a textbook,” she wrote.

“It can be a potent tool to right past wrongs and improve people’s lives. That’s why so many of Treasury’s 84,000 public servants joined the Department.

Today, I am proud to be one of them. ”

Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo ’03 will join his new boss, Janet Yellen, in making Treasury history by becoming the department’s first Black deputy. The Nigerianborn economist immigrated to California with his family as an infant and grew up in the Inland Empire. He earned his political science degree from Berkeley before continuing on to Yale Law School. A 2015 CAA Mark Bingham Award recipient, Adeyemo is a Treasury veteran, having worked under the Obama administration as deputy executive secretary. As President Obama’s international economic adviser he served as the U.S. representative for both the G7 and G20 summits.

In the Biden-Harris administration, he will likely take the lead in implementing a new economic strategy with respect to China.

Frances H. Arnold, Ph.D. ’85, the first American woman Nobel laureate in chemistry, has been appointed cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Arnold, a professor at Caltech, won the Nobel in 2018 for her work on the directed evolution of enzymes, a technology that could be crucial for developing sustainable biofuels and green chemistry. She will be joined in her role by MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber. The duo will be the first women to lead the PCAST. Other members of the council include geneticist Eric Lander, who will be the president’s top science advisor, a position Biden has, for the first time, elevated to a cabinet-level appointment. Said Arnold, “I have great hope that we can put science back to work for the benefit of all.”

On February 2, Alejandro Mayorkas ’81, who fled to the United States with his family after the Cuban Revolution, became the first immigrant to be sworn in as secretary of homeland security. His confirmation had the strong support of four former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) heads—including former UC President Janet Napolitano—who decried the “leadership vacuum and turmoil” in DHS under the Trump administration. Previously, Mayorkas served as deputy secretary of DHS in the Obama administration, and helped spearhead Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Under his direction, the department is expected to roll back the more draconian immigration policies of the Trump administration.

Mayorkas says he also plans to focus on increased cybersecurity and strengthened emergency response protocols.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PATRICK WELSH