Fiat Vox

"By gossiping about celebrities and by talking about what they've done that isn't so great, it allows us to establish our values as a community and also for me, as an individual, to advertise my values to the people I'm speaking with," says Julia Fawcett, a professor who teaches a course called The History of Celebrity in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. 

Celebrities, one theory goes, act to unite imagined communities in a modern nation. When people used to know everyone in their villages, now we use celebrities to come together in a new kind of group. "I’m a fan of Beyoncé, and you’re a fan of Beyoncé, so now we’re a part of this imagined community," says Fawcett.

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

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Rose Wilkerson, a sociolinguist and lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley, shares how it feels to her to live in the U.S. as an African American. 

After Thoughts is a series that highlights moments from Fiat Vox interviews that didn’t make it into the final episode. This excerpt is from an interview with Wilkerson featured in Fiat Vox episode #69: “Language is more than how we speak — it's home.”

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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When archeologists, funded by University of California benefactor Phoebe A. Hearst, found hundreds of crocodile mummies on an expedition to Northern Egypt in 1899, they were annoyed. They were searching for human mummies and artifacts, fueled by Egyptomania — the Western obsession with all things Egyptian.

When they found papyri — paper's earliest ancestor — stuffed inside of the mummies with text written on it by Egyptians thousands of years before, they were suddenly interested. But instead of collecting the mummies, they began to break them open, remove the papyri and discard the crocodiles.

Now, more than 100 years later, 19 mummified crocodiles are part of the Egyptian collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. These mummies, along with a collection of papyri held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at the Bancroft Library, give us clues about how everyday ancient Egyptians lived and how far they went to appease crocodiles, hoping their devotion would win them some good will toward humankind.

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

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Dacher Keltner, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center and a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, discusses how our sense of self goes silent while experiencing awe and while using psychedelics. 

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

This audio excerpt is from an interview with Keltner that was featured in Fiat Vox episode #68: "Building community one person at a time."

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When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to — they're not ... necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings," she says.

How we speak, says sociolinguist and Berkeley lecturer Rose Wilkerson, represents who we are— our culture, our family and our sense of place in the world. So, when a person is criticized for how they speak, she says, it cuts to the heart. 

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

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In a time when our nation is more ideologically divided than ever, it's crucial that we find ways to come together across differences and find common ground, says UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. But how do we do this?

For staffer Tyrone Wise, it starts with asking tough questions and then listening — really listening — to the answer. "When we take time to understand what people are saying to us,” he says, “then we can better understand who they are as people."

Wise says that including a range of perspectives when making decisions creates a stronger community — something that he's working to build at Berkeley.

And a sense of community, says Keltner, which has been lost in our individualistic society, is essential to our survival. By searching for shared values, honoring differences and knowing when to use "tough compassion," he says, we can begin to build bridges and heal as a nation.

Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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This is the second part of the two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations.

Last week, we heard from UC Berkeley's Ella Callow about how the U.S. government built a psychiatric institution in the early 1900s to imprison Native Americans.

Today, Callow discusses how Native communities are still forced to exist in societal systems that use disability to justify taking Native children away from their families, and to ultimately control, and make money from, their lives.

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

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In the late 1800s, two South Dakota congressmen were looking for ways to build an economy in their newly minted state — one that was carved out of Indigenous homelands. They decided on a mental institution for Native Americans. It would become the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians — a place where Native people from across the country would be forcibly committed and imprisoned, often for reasons that had nothing to do with mental illness. From its opening in 1903 to 1933, when it was closed after a short, but brutal, existence, more than 350 Native people had been held, and at least 121 people had died, in the facility.

This is the first part of a two-part series about how disability has been and continues to be used as a way to control and profit from Native populations. In the next episode, we'll learn about how state courts today use disability as a reason to justify removing Native children from their parents' custody and cultural environment to place them in non-Native homes.

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

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After hearing the decision in the Breonna Taylor case on Wednesday — that the white police officer who shot and killed the 26-year-old Black medical technician was charged with only a low-level felony — Savala Trepczynski, the director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said a familiar feeling sunk in.

"The fact of the charge is upsetting, disappointing, angering — all of those things," said Trepczynski. "And so, I felt the exhaustion of forbearance and abiding and feeling again and again that even when you get justice, it’s kind of a half step. It’s a measure of justice. It’s not the whole thing."

And she was reminded of a murder so similar to Taylor's that happened in her own family — to her great-great-grandmother. 

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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"People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. — and they should. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement," says Ula Taylor, a professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. But, what they might not know, she says, is that it was actually the behind-the-scenes organizing effort by the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, that made the boycott successful.

"Even though these women were not in the limelight, they were engaging in a form of leadership," says Taylor. "But because we live in a country in a culture where we oftentimes identify leadership as a talking head, we don’t understand all of the thinking that goes behind a lot of the ideas that the talking head is even articulating."

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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UC Berkeley's Oral History Center and KQED teamed up to record the longest interview that Jerry Brown has ever done — one that offers a first-person account of his nearly five decades in California politics. For 20 sessions, they sat at Brown’s dining room table at his ranch in Colusa County and asked him about everything from what it is was like having a father in politics to dating singer Linda Ronstadt to his views on politics today.

See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Feb. 14, 2018, began like any other day for Kai Koerber. He was running late for his early morning AP English class at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. When he got there, he was handed the class's biggest assignment of the year and groaned. "At the time, I was like, 'Man, this is going to be the worst part of my day,'" says Koerber, now a first-year computer science major at UC Berkeley.

After English, he had honors chemistry, followed by pre-calculus, then guitar class in the band room. At 2:18 p.m., he asked to use the restroom, but another classmate was out, so his teacher told Kai to wait. Two minutes later, the fire alarm went off. And what followed was a tragedy that his school would become known for — one that Kai would decide to speak out about, changing the narrative about the impact of gun violence on youth in the United States.

At Berkeley, in between classes and studying, Kai works to promote his nonprofit and mental health curriculum — something that he's become passionate about since he survived one of the deadliest school shootings in the country.

Read the transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.

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After student Drew Woodson took a playwriting course with Philip Gotanda, a professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at Berkeley, he realized he had a story to tell. Two years later, that story would become his first play, Your Friend, Jay Silverheels. “The original idea for this play came out of this frustration I was having as an actor of not being able to find monologues that really fit and felt true to who I am as a Native person,” says Woodson. “I knew I had to write this story, to get it down on paper — not only for myself as an actor, but for other Native actors who maybe felt the same way as me.”

On Dec. 5, Woodson is staging a reading of Your Friend, Jay Silverheels in Durham Studio Theater in Dwinelle Hall on campus.

Listen, see photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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Saida Dahir grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. At first, she thought she was like everyone else. But by sixth grade, she realized she was different. Her family was from Somalia — she was born in a refugee camp in Kenya after her family fled the civil war. The more she tried to fit in, the worse she felt. But in eighth grade, when she met Mr. Brandy, a journalism and English teacher, she began to realize her own power and started writing poetry. By her senior year, she was performing her poetry at protests and rallies across the country, proudly commenting on the injustices she saw all around her.

Listen, see photos and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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When UC Berkeley architect Ronald Rael took his bright pink teeter totters to the U.S.-Mexico border wall, he didn't know that what he and his team did next would go viral. He just wanted to create a moment where people on both sides of the wall felt connected to each other. “Women and children completely disempowered this wall for a moment, for 40 minutes," says Rael. "There was a kind of sanctuary hovering over this event."

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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"I grew up just super dirt poor ... about as poor as you can be in this country," says first-year Berkeley Law student, Blake Danser. School was where Danser felt safe, where he thrived. "And then puberty hit, and I felt weird in a way that I couldn't really identify," he says. At the time, Blake was actually Amanda — a 14-year-old self-described tomboy. After seeing a transgender character in a TV show, Danser thought that maybe that's why he felt different — because he was transgender. But a friend convinced him that he wasn't, and Danser forgot about it until years later.

After high school, Danser realized he couldn't afford college, so he joined the Air Force. "In the military, everything is very divided into male and female," says Blake. "It just very much sank in that this was not right for me. I was not female." For the next three years, he transitioned from female to male — an experience he says was awkward at times, but supported by the military. He also took online courses throughout his active service, and received his bachelor's degree in history. 

Now, at Berkeley Law, Danser says he wants to help low-income communities, like the one he grew up in. And he wants to share his experience of what it’s like to be transgender and a veteran.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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Gemma Givens, who works at UC Berkeley's International House, was adopted from Guatemala in 1990 when she was 4 months old. Her mom, Melinda, was a graduate student at Berkeley at the time. She had a simple story she would tell Gemma about her adoption. "The story was that Gemma needed a mom and I needed a child, and so we found each other. It was a good enough story for a while," says Melinda. As Gemma grew older, though, it wasn't enough. "I felt like I was foundationless, or that I was floating, or I was a ghost, or I was a genetic isolate, which, in a way, I was," Gemma says. It would lead her to Guatemala, where her search for her birth mother would reveal the corrupt business of intercountry adoption in Guatemala and inspire her to create an international community of Guatemalan adoptees.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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For Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, coming out didn’t happen all at once. As a graduate student in 1980, she met her wife, Esther Hargis. A few of their friends knew they were together, but “it wasn’t something you told people.” Esther was a Baptist pastor, so she needed to be careful at the time to protect her career. It wasn’t until the couple decided to adopt their son, Jimmy, nearly two decades later, that they decided they had to live their lives fully out.

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Growing up in New York City, UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy remembers seeing a lot of nurses — dressed in their crisp white uniforms. She and her mom lived in an apartment building near several hospitals, so seeing health workers in the community wasn’t unusual.

But she also noticed that many of the nurses were Filipino.

Her mom was an immigrant from the Philippines. And when they’d go to Filipino events, it was common to see a lot of nurses.

“I think when I was growing up, it was just part of the familiar landscape of home,” she says, “and what it was like to be in New York City. I didn’t really question it as a child. It just seemed natural or normal to me.”

Years later, as a graduate student at UCLA, Choy began to wonder: Why were there so many Filipino nurses in the U.S.? What she found took her back to the early 20th century after the Philippines became a U.S. colony.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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On October 11, 1923, three brothers — Hugh, Ray and Roy DeAutremont — boarded a Southern Pacific Railroad train called the Gold Special near the Siskiyou Mountains in Oregon. The trio planned to rob the mail car. But instead of making off with their fortune, they killed four people and blew up the mail car and the valuables inside. A huge manhunt followed and authorities called in an up-and-coming forensic scientist and UC Berkeley lecturer and alumnus Edward Oscar Heinrich to help solve what became known as the Last Great Train Robbery. He didn't know that the case would put him on the map as a pioneer in American criminology. 

And now, nearly 100 years later, Heinrich's collection of crime materials from this case — and thousands of others he worked on throughout his career — are available for research in the Bancroft Library's archives at UC Berkeley. 

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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In 1970, when Chancellor Carol Christ joined UC Berkeley's English department as an assistant professor, only 3% of the faculty on campus were women. “I always felt like a pioneer, in part, because I’m of the generation of the feminist revolution,” says Christ.

In this Fiat Vox podcast episode, Christ and her longtime friend and colleague Carol Clover, a professor emerita in Scandinavian studies and film studies, discuss what it was like for women in the academy 50 years ago and how it’s changed, what makes a strong leader — and offer advice to the next generation of Berkeley women.

See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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When Amy Nostbakken and Nora Sadava started writing Mouthpiece six years ago, they revealed their deepest secrets to each other with the prompt: “Tell me something that you would never want anyone ever to know.” From that, they created a raw, one-hour confessional that reflects what it feels like in one woman’s head after she finds out her mother has died and that she has to deliver the eulogy the next day. 

Mouthpiece premiered in 2015, and four years later, Amy and Nora, who make up the Toronto-based company Quote Unquote Collective, are performing the play for the last time on March 22-24 in the Zellerbach Playhouse. It’s the last performance of Cal Performances’ 2018-19 Berkeley RADICAL Initiative’s strand “Women’s Work,” which takes a specific look at the extraordinary artistry of women who are expanding the definition of what it is to be an artist in the 21st century.

“This continuum of women’s voices and their work — the work that drives them — is important to put a spotlight on,” says Sabrina Klein, director of artistic literacy at Cal Performances. “Every single one is unique. Every single one is different. But it’s not incidental that they’re connected as women across this continuum of making work — live work, new work, fresh work, continually meaningful work.” 

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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Malika Imhotep grew up in West Atlanta, rooted in a community that she calls an "Afrocentric bubble," in a family of artisans, entrepreneurs and community organizers. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, she's studying how black women and femmes make sense of themselves in a society designed, in many ways, to keep them out. "I’m interested in how people create new possibilities for themselves, either inside of mainstream society or outside of it, or underneath it or on top of it.”

But she couldn't do it alone. She needed to find and nurture a community of thinkers who could aid in the development of her research and her personal journey of discovery. So, she — along with Miyuki Baker, a Ph.D. candidate in theater, dance and performances — started the Church of Black Feminist Thought.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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When Karen Denton got a job in UC Berkeley's registrar's office at 20, she had one job: to remove incompletes. "I did that all day every day," she says. Her tools of the trade? A fountain pen, an inkwell, an eraser, a razor blade and a marble. At 71, Karen has been the assistant registrar for two decades and has worked in records for 49 years. And she has no plans to retire anytime soon. "Why would I retire?" she asks. "I love working here. I love the students. I love the challenge." But she will leave sometime, and before she does, she wants to have all student records — dating back to the late 1800s — digitized.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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In 1849, a man named Abraham Holland packed up his things and left his life on the East Coast for California, in hopes that he’d strike it rich. The year before, gold had been discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and people were coming from across the U.S. — and the world — to seek their fortune. It became known as the California Gold Rush. It marked a new set of opportunities for African American migration to California.

On Saturday, Feb. 23, Berkeley staffer Gia White, who volunteers as a docent at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, will give a tour about notable African Americans — including Holland, and Berkeley alumni Ida Louise Jackson and Walter Gordon — who are buried in the cemetery. 

“It’s a privilege to talk about their life stories, because when are they going to be heard?" says Gia. "I feel like, you’re just doing them a little honor by talking about them again.”

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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For Black History Month, we are resharing Fiat Vox episode #23, first published in 2018, about Clothilde Hewlett, the executive director of the Cal Alumni Association:

Some people move to San Francisco for its jobs. Or its nightlife. Or its natural beauty.

But Clothilde Hewlett moved for Rice-A-Roni. Hewlett was 14 years old waiting at the Canadian border with her mom and two younger sisters. They’d been there for two weeks, but things weren’t looking promising. “And at one point, my mother, out of despair, looked at me and she said, ‘Where do you wanna go?’ says Hewlett. “And all I could think of is I had a seen a commercial called Rice-A-Roni and it didn’t look like people in San Francisco were suffering. So I said, ‘San Francisco.'”

Listen to Hewlett’s story — how she pulled herself out of poverty, found salvation as a student at UC Berkeley, climbed the ranks in the government and corporate America and returned to the campus, where she giving back to students who need it most.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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When Erika Johnson was 7, her Ukrainian mom put her in ballet class. Although Erika didn’t have the body that most principal dancers were known for, she had the work ethic that it took to be successful. "It was never like, ‘I must handpick you and cultivate you like a rose,’ says Erika. "You know it was like, ‘If you work hard, you might get a job.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, well I’m going to work hard.’” Shaped by her ballet career, Erika is now a development associate at Berkeley. Not only has ballet has played a big role in her life — it has helped keep her connected to her Ukrainian culture.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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Every morning, Marco Lindsey wakes up in East Oakland, where he was born and raised. He puts on a suit and tie, packs his briefcase, chats with his neighbors and drives to work at Berkeley Haas. It's a typical morning routine, but to Marco, it’s a lot more than that. It’s a way to show boys and young men in his community that they have possibilities. He didn't have that growing up. But his drive — and mentors who helped steer him — propelled him forward, and now he's helping others to succeed. His motto: Live your life as if your 80-year-old self is guiding you.

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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In the summer of 1996, Will Thomas and Dave Deacy were wading in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, watching the annual hydroplane races. Will kicked something with his foot, bent down and pulled something up. It was a human skull. Turns out, it was a really old skull — 9,000 years old, one of the oldest human remains found in North America. It’s a discovery that would fuel an ongoing debate between scientists and Native Americans about how ancestral remains should be treated. It also inspired Beth Piatote, an associate professor of Native American studies at UC Berkeley and a member of the Nez Perce tribe, to write the play Antíkoni. It’s a Native American version of the Greek tragedy, Antigone.

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When John Patton was in high school, he changed his name to Quamé. When he got to UC Berkeley as a student, "it stuck, instantly," he says. At Berkeley, Quamé's world opened up: "African American studies changed my life." After graduating, getting a master's degree, trying to make it as a DJ, hitting rock bottom, then coming back to his alma mater to teach hip hop, Quamé is still Quamé. And he's an academic counselor, helping students unlock their potential and follow their hearts.

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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In the 1940s and 50s, actors in major American films, like Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, spoke with a kind of faux British accent as a way to sound “upper class.” This pronunciation spread across the country as a kind of standard to imitate. The problem was, this way of talking left out nearly all actual American voices, says Tom McEnaney, a UC Berkeley professor who teaches a class called “Sounding American.”

While the class talks about the generational differences of sound — no one today really speaks like movie stars of the 40s — they also discuss how today’s filmmakers, like Boots Riley in “Sorry to Bother You,” are pushing back against the racial norms concealed in what we might say sounds American. McEnaney says the film, about a young black telemarketer who uses his “white voice” to be successful at sales, takes the sense that many people have — that whiteness is a kind of invisible standard against which all other cultures are judged in the U.S. — and makes the audience think about how whiteness is audible, and is another kind of difference.

Listen to the story on Berkeley News.

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Professor Tom McEnaney, who teaches a class called “Sounding American,” says the U.S. has a long history of men criticizing the way women speak. Sound technologies, starting with the gramophone and phonograph, he says, were developed for men's voices — and distort women’s.

Read the story on Berkeley News.

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After Lux — one of the peregrine falcons born on the Campanile — died last year after striking a window of Evans Hall, the campus community was heartbroken. But Carla Cicero, the staff curator of birds at UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, has given the peregrine a new purpose. Lux is now one of 750,000 specimens — birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals — at the museum used for research at Berkeley and across the world. Lux is the 4,287th specimen that Carla has prepped for the museum in the past 30 years. Although the museum is closed to the public, for one day a year — Cal Day, in April — people are invited in to see special displays.

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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Last week, Berkeley students noticed that one of the Campanile’s four clocks stopped. While the north-facing clock was at a standstill, the other three kept going. How could that happen? Turns out each of the clocks has its own motor and runs independently from one another. But because the bell tower’s clocks are so old — the Campanile was built more than 100 years ago — its parts can’t just be replaced. The campus has to send them away to be repaired or find another way to keep the clocks ticking. 

A few years ago, I interviewed Art Simmons — an electrician on campus whose job it was to keep the clocks going. Now, a machinist who worked with Art is looking after the clocks. But I thought it’d be a good time to share a story that Art told me about how he saved the day with a light bulb and a little common sense.

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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As a kid, Makayla Bozeman could not stop dancing. She'd go to bed late because she was dancing. She'd wake up in the middle of the night to dance. When she was 13, she applied to AileyCamp — a six-week summer program run by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley where 11- to 14-year-olds from the East Bay learn dance from professional choreographers. She soon realized that AileyCamp was so much more than a dance camp — it was a chance to discover who she was and learn how to navigate her complex social world.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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Canadian author Margaret Atwood doesn't like being called a soothsayer. "Anyone who says they can predict the future is... not telling the truth," she says. But like it or not, it's a label she's been given since the revival of her 33-year-old dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale" was made into a popular Hulu TV series that aired just months after the election of Donald Trump as president. The story is set in near-future New England in a totalitarian and theocratic state that has overthrown the U.S. government. Because of low reproduction rates, certain fertile women are forced to become Handmaids to bear children for elite couples.

As part of On the Same Page, a program of UC Berkeley's College of Letter and Science, all 8,800 incoming students got a copy of the novel to read over the summer, so when they arrived on campus, they would have something in common to talk about — socially, in classes and at events designed to explore the book's themes.

Berkeley News sat down with Margaret Atwood for a few minutes before her appearance on campus last week to talk about her book's recent revival and how — in her view, and that of many of the book's fans — the Trump presidency is bringing the U.S. a step closer to becoming her fictional Republic of Gilead.

See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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After seeing Handspring Puppet Company — the creators of the puppets in Broadway's " War Horse" — at UC Berkeley in 2015, Glynn Bartlett knew he wanted to work with them. So he packed his bags and traveled to South Africa, where he built puppets for an annual parade and play performed on the Day of Reconciliation. Bartlett, a scenic artist for the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, says the experience reminded him just how powerful puppets can be in bringing people together.

Read the story on Berkeley News.

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When Derek Coates was 10, he found out he had a degenerative eye disease and was going to gradually lose his eyesight. Over the next 30 years, his visual world shrunk until he became completely blind at 41. Now, as a disability compliance officer at UC Berkeley, it’s his job to make sure students with disabilities are getting the accommodations they need to be academically successful.

Read the transcript, see photos and find more disability resources on Berkeley News.

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The peregrine falcons that first made a home on UC Berkeley's Campanile last year get a lot of attention every spring when their babies hatch. But it's also amazing to watch the adults in action. At speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, peregrines are the fastest animal in the world — three times faster than a cheetah. Mary Malec, a volunteer raptor nest monitor for the East Bay Regional Park District, describes a time when the mama peregrine chased a pigeon through unknowing crowds on campus.

See photos and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Noah Whiteman, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, has always known how to survive. He moved to Sax-Zim, a rural area in Minnesota, when he was 11 and spent the next seven years learning to fish and hunt with his naturalist dad and hiding that he was gay. When a boy he'd been friends with started to bully him at every chance he got, Noah knew it was time to get out.

See photos and read a Q&A with Noah Whiteman on Berkeley News.

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When Thalia Zepatos joined the Freedom to Marry campaign in 2010, she had a big job ahead of her: she had to craft a totally new message about same-sex marriage that would convince Americans that supporting the issue was the right thing to do. "It was looking for that statement that a lot of people could nod their heads to," said Zepatos. "It wasn’t about who was participating in the marriage, it was about what it really stands for. And we were trying to elevate that conversation."

Five years later on June 26, 2015, same-sex marriage was made legal in the U.S.

Martin Meeker, the director of the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center at UC Berkeley, interviewed Zepatos and nearly a dozen others about the Freedom to Marry campaign for the center's Freedom to Marry Oral History Project. Listen to Meeker talk about how a single message can help change a nation's opinion.

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Billy Curtis, the director of the Gender Equity Resource Center at UC Berkeley, has spent the past two decades working to build a more inclusive campus for the LGBTQ community. This year, he was named a grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade and Celebration, an honor given to people and organizations for their work and advocacy in helping strengthen LGBTQ communities in the Bay Area. “I see this as an opportunity for us as a university to highlight our past, present and continued support of the LGBTQ community,” he said. “We’re getting honored, but let’s recommit to serving the LGBTQ+ community and any emerging un-yet-named marginalized sexualities and genders.”

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Inside of Joshua Ahazie’s mind live hundreds of songs. Since he was a kid, he would hear a melody and then he would hear all the parts — the vocals, how to play it on the piano. How it all went together. "I really thought I was going crazy." But he soon realized it was a gift. It's this gift of seeing how different pieces can go together to create a whole, he says, that has helped his succeed as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business — he's graduating Monday, May 14 at the Hearst Greek Theatre — and has given him the vision to launch his social enterprise, Atide.

See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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When Marcy Whitebook worked as a childcare teacher in the 1970s, she made less than $2 an hour. She was amazed at how little she made for the hard and important work she did with infants and toddlers. So Whitebook, with a group of teacher-activists, launched a national campaign in 1992 called Worthy Wage Day. The day of action, held every year on May 1, aims to raise awareness of the low wages earned by early childhood educators and draw attention to the chronic underfunding of public education. In this podcast episode, Whitebook, now the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley, talks about how she and her team used faxes and mimeographs to get Worthy Wage Day to go viral.

Read the story and see photos on Berkeley News.

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There are more than 5 million species of fungi, and each one likes a particular food. Some like sawdust. Others like plastic. Some can even digest heavy metals. After the fungi eat their meal, what was once waste turns into a new, natural and compostable material that can just be left to decompose or be used in all sorts of practical ways, from cleaning up oil spills to fashioning faux leather handbags to building houses. Sonia Travaglini, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, tells us all about it.

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When Derrika Hunt was in third grade, she didn't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. She remembers telling her mom, "This doesn't feel right to me. Why am I saying this pledge and then going home every day to my community, seeing people suffering, seeing people marginalized?" Now, a Ph.D. candidate in education at UC Berkeley, Derrika takes teenage girls of color around the world through her nonprofit, Dreamers4Change Foundation. It's a way for them, all of whom are from economically disadvantaged communities, to see that another world exists and realize that change is possible.

Read the story on Berkeley News.

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"People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. And they know that it's the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement," says Ula Taylor, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. What people often don't know, she says, is that the boycott was started by the Women's Political Council, a group made up of more than 200 black women led by Jo Ann Robinson in Montgomery, Alabama.

In the last of a four-part series that highlights a different African American leader on campus for our podcast, Fiat Vox, Taylor talks about the women activists that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence and how she encourages her students to harness the leader within themselves to create the world they want to live in.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Like a lot of leaders, Sidalia Reel started young. In fifth grade, she ran her household, making sure her four younger siblings didn't get into too much trouble. Now, she's the director of staff diversity initiatives in the Office of Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley, making sure more than 9,000 staff feel like a valued part of campus. To some, it might seem daunting. But for Reel, it's a natural fit. This is part of a series for Black History Month highlighting the work of African American leaders on campus.

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As a kid, Alfred Day would spend hours holed up indoors reading comics. He loved Batman and Superman, but the character who really spoke to him — who taught him that he could be smart and powerful — was Black Panther. Day, the director of student affairs case management at UC Berkeley, is a co-founder of Berkeley HEROES, a staff club that meets once a month to talk about comics and graphic novels on their list. In February for Black History Month, they're reading the first volume of Ta-Nehisi Coates' current Black Panther series.

Read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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As an undergraduate in Colorado, Kenly Brown was one of only a few African Americans on her campus. She felt isolated in the classroom, often expected to speak on behalf of all black people. Now, as a Ph.D. candidate in African American studies at UC Berkeley, she’s made it her priority to be a mentor to students of color.

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Before Clothilde Hewlett became the executive director of the Cal Alumni Association in 2016, she had lived many other lives. She spent years of her childhood in tenement housing in Philadelphia's inner city before she and her family were called to San Francisco by a Rice-A-Roni television commercial. She attended UC Berkeley, became a lawyer, climbed the ranks of the government of corporate America, then came back to her alma mater, where it all began.

Read the story and see photos of Hewlett on Berkeley News.

This is part of a 2018 series for Black History Month, featuring interviews with African American leaders at UC Berkeley.

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Underground at UC Berkeley, seismic sensors capture the deep rumbles from Bay Area earthquakes. Here's what a 4.4-magnitude earthquake that shook the Bay Area last year on Jan. 4, 2018 sounded like. Geophysicist Peggy Hellweg from the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab explains what we're hearing when an earthquake happens.

Listen and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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Most of us know by now that recreational cannabis became legal in California on Jan. 1. But there's still a lot we don't know about the plant, despite its long history of human use, says Eric Siegel, the director of the UC Botanical Garden. So the garden is hosting a lecture series called the "Science of Cannabis," where experts will discuss everything from the environmental impacts of large-scale cannabis cultivation to the neurological effect of cannabis in our brains.

Read more about the lecture series on Berkeley News.

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Christopher Richardson, a sophomore and aspiring triple major at UC Berkeley, has been competing in classical piano since he was 9 years old. Since then, he's competed at least 50 times. It's when he feels most alive, and most connected to himself.

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Parham Pourdavood, an incoming computer science student at UC Berkeley, grew up in Iran. He says that he, like most people, didn't challenge authorities. He wasn't an activist. He studied hard in high school and didn't draw attention to himself. He'd heard about government oppression, but hadn't seen it with his own eyes. He just knew he couldn’t speak his mind. It's why he's such a strong supporter of free speech today.

Story and photos on Berkeley News.

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"I was amazed at how he walked on, and he just got the attention of everyone right there,” says Kyle Ko, a fourth-year music major. “You could see everyone’s intense focus. You could feel it on the stage.” Ko, along with student Hallie Jo Gist, attended a master class taught by world-class conductor Riccardo Muti. Master classes, put on by Cal Performances and the Department of Music, give members of the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra a chance to learn from top musicians.

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When Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas coast in late August, Americans had a choice: they could share their resources or look the other way. Although as a society, we tend to value individualism, it doesn’t always make us happy, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Instead, sharing what we have often brings us more joy.

Read the story on Berkeley News. (Texas National Guard photo by Zachary West via Flickr)

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Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke on UC Berkeley's campus in September 2017. Berkeley News spoke to students and alumni as they waited in line to attend the event, protested peacefully outside — and got some reactions as they left the venue.

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Cal Quidditch got its start on Berkeley's campus about eight years ago. For two consecutive years, the team has played in a national competition. "It wasn't expected from a young, scrappy team out of UC Berkeley," says co-captain Owen Egger. Scrappy or not, the 60-some players on the Cal team have a lot of fun.

Story and 360-degree video on Berkeley News.

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The acoustics that make the sound of Zellerbach Hall didn’t just happen. The sound has been created with an acoustic system of some 40 microphones and 140 speakers, all intricately placed throughout the hall. It’s called Constellation by Meyer Sound. 

Constellation allows you to digitally create multiple environments in one space by changing the length of reverberation, strength or loudness. It can even change the perceived height and width of a room. 

So, if you close your eyes, it can transport you to a big, open space like a cathedral. Turn off the reverb and it becomes a normal stage.

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We’re at UC Berkeley’s Campanile courtyard listening to sounds of an ancient bell that have never been heard before. It’s the 20-foot-tall, 200-ton Russian “Tsar Bell” — the largest bell in the world — in duet with the campus’s carillon.

But the bell isn’t actually here. It’s at the Moscow Kremlin. A UC Berkeley team, along with researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan, worked together to digitally create the sound they believed the bell would make.

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The CDC released a report recommending that women of childbearing age who aren’t taking birth control should abstain from drinking alcohol. Berkeley Law professor Melissa Murray says the report gives the impression that women are incapable of making responsible choices about their reproductive health.

Photo by Frédéric Poirot via Flickr.

Story on Berkeley News.

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These days so many of our devices are smart. Our phones are smart. Our cars are smart. Our TVs are smart. And now, even vibrators can be smart. It’s called Lioness. It’s a sleek, sophisticated vibrator that works kind of like a running app on your smartphone, but instead of mapping the distance and terrain of a route, it records a person’s sexual arousal states.

Liz Klinger is the CEO and co-founder of Lioness. She and her team work out of SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s incubator for startups. She says her upbringing inspired her to pursue a career in sexual health.

Photos, video and story on Berkeley News.

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Marriage — modernly — is seen as sort of unalloyed good, says law professor Melissa Murray. “Everyone would like to get married, or most people would like to get married. Certainly, most people’s mothers want them to get married.”

Murray teaches family law at UC Berkeley. She says the marriage equality movement has built up the idea that marriage is this wonderful thing that everyone should want. And there are a lot of benefits to being married in the United States. People who are married have better financial outcomes than people who aren’t. They are often healthier (especially men), and they have access to a range of public and private benefits, like Social Security and shared employee health and other benefit plans.

But she says there’s a darker side to marriage that’s been overlooked.

Photo by Blyth Scott Photography via Flickr. See photos and read the story on Berkeley News.

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In 2004, Scott Zimmermann had a big idea. He had just quit the oil and gas industry — he’d been working in it for eight years, trying to reduce the impacts of fossil fuels — and enrolled at UC Berkeley as a dual-degree law student and master’s student in the Energy and Resources Group.

He knew he wanted to do something about climate change. But instead of lobbying for the state or the federal government to adopt carbon cap laws, as a lot of environmentalists were doing at the time, he decided to start right where he was — with the campus.

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The Campanile clock tower is the campus’s North Star. At 100 years old and 307 feet tall, it’s a landmark everyone knows and trusts. But what happens when the clocks stop? There’s only one person to call: Art Simmons.

“Everybody in Berkeley watches those clocks,” says Simmons. “Not just the people on campus. So when the clocks stop, the whole city knows about it and it doesn’t look good.”

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We’re at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. A long line curves through the gardens, and a small group huddles in a steamy greenhouse, all here to get a whiff of Trudy.

Garden director Paul Licht stands at the front, talking to one of the many groups to visit during the latest Trudy mania. “It goes in waves, doesn’t it?” he asks. “None have ever smelled as much the day after it opened.”

Trudy is a tropical plant called a Titan Arum, known best for the putrid odor it emits when it blooms.

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