The Berkeley Blog » Arts, Culture & Humanities

My love-hate relationship with Mother’s Day

Christine Carter — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:59:49 +0000

I hate to admit this, but I’ve come to feel entitled to breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day (complete with gifts and a clean kitchen afterwards), a family hike (no whining, everyone remembers their water bottles and packs their own snack, remembering one for me), and a little downtime with a good book before dinner.

But truth be told, I rarely get all, if any, of these Mother’s Day treats. I know this shouldn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t irritate me… but it kinda does, or it has in the past. It’s a horrible confession for someone like me to make, ... More >

Suicide boom?

Claude Fischer — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:04:14 +0000

Charles Fischer [no relation to your blogger] arrived in New York City in 1890. A well-educated clerk from Stuttgart, Germany, he struggled in America, failing in real estate, in the saloon business, and finally in china plate decorating. He divorced and lost touch with his only child. Fischer wrote his mother, “I cannot stand this much longer. If I don’t get work within two weeks I will have to go out on the street and work as a laborer.” At 10:00 pm on a Saturday evening in 1896, he entered his small rented room on East 3rd Street, sealed up ... More >

New Worlds Older: Native Americans in 1494 Vatican Fresco

Rosemary Joyce — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:05:12 +0000

In 1494, an Italian artist named Pinturicchio completed a fresco– painting on wet plaster– in the rooms of the recently elevated pope, Alexander the Sixth. After Pope Alexander died in 1503, his rooms were closed off, the frescos covered. Although opened to visitors in 1889, NPR reporting tells us that it is only with a recently completed cleaning of the frescos that a tiny detail became clear enough to see.

What is revealed is a background scene showing a group of about half a dozen human figures, nude, dancing around a central pole. The head of one figure is crowned by ... More >

Sexual license, sexual limits

Claude Fischer — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:14:26 +0000

One clear social change of the last half-century is Americans’ increasing support of sexual freedom. It is all around us: magazines at the check-out counter blaring advice about orgasms, easy-access pornography on the web and soft-core pornography on cable, hooking-up culture on tv programs, and nonchalance about couples “living together” before (or after) marriage (see this earlier post).

(Source)

Sexual restraints loosened over much of the twentieth century, but the great release, so to speak, occurred in the late 1960s. As I noted in a post three years ago, the hinge of change seemed to between the time that Diana Ross ... More >

For women in science, it’s still chilly out there

Rosemary Joyce — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:10:42 +0000

Biological anthropologist Kate Clancy — who is getting media attention for a poorly acknowledged fact of life in field science: the chilling effect of sexual harassment — writes as follows:

Survival in field-based academic science can’t just be about who can put up with or witness abuse the longest – that is not an appropriate metric to measure who is the best at their science

Last October, an international study of women’s participation in science, technology, engineering and math fields (collectively, STEM fields) found that women still are under-represented in such careers. In fact, the study found that participation by women in ... More >

Markets, prices and justice

Claude Fischer — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:06:11 +0000

In February, 1917, thousands of women stormed the streets in the poorer parts of Brooklyn, New York, overturning pushcarts and setting them on fire. It took police hours to restore order. [1] The women were protesting rapid increases in the prices of food staples and decried the injustice of hungry children. Congress was soon in debate. One senator warned that the disorders showed that “the country is dividing into two great classes – the very poor and the very rich.” [2] In fact, the U.S. had had many earlier commodity riots, going back to the founding of the nation; it ... More >

Three insights from research about immigrant families

Jeremy Adam Smith — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:18:29 +0000

Everything you think you know about immigrant families is probably wrong. That’s one of the conclusions I took away from the annual meeting of the Council on Contemporary Families, which convenes scholars and writers from around North America to discuss new scientific findings about the family.

This year’s conference at the University of Miami focused on immigrant families, and I heard from researchers whose discoveries undercut much of the “conventional wisdom” around immigration. For example, so-called “illegals” are remarkably law-abiding, in part because they live in fear of deportation and so won’t do anything that might entangle themselves with law enforcement. ... More >

Writerly baseball – opening day 2013

Claude Fischer — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:21:58 +0000

Writers – academic, commercial, and intellectual – have for generations indulged themselves writing about baseball. (This post, of course, becomes a further meta-indulgence.) There is nothing close in either American fiction or literary nonfiction about football or basketball, however much those other sports dominate the TV screen these days.[1]

Much of the baseball genre now tends to be nostalgic, elegies to a past of country pastures, sandlots, and pickup games. I was reminded of this trope when reading a recent essay in The (new) New Republic by Kent Russell about Amish boys playing ball. Russell’s essay combines two forms of nostalgia ... More >

Back home

Claude Fischer — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:20:55 +0000

One of the major lifestyle changes of the twentieth century was the dramatic increase in the proportion of Americans who lived alone. [1] Virtually outlawed in Early America, rarely done in the early twentieth century, it became a stage of life for many Americans, especially for elderly women, by the end of the century. (In 2000, about one-third of American women 65 and older were living alone.)

Studio (source)

The question of whether this trend is a good or bad thing has been a matter of concern. Eric Klinenberg’s recent best-seller, Going Solo, conveys the positive side of the discussion (see ... More >

Catholic schism

Claude Fischer — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:34:52 +0000

With the resignation of Pope Benedict and election of a new pope, amidst what seems an unending turmoil over sex abuse by priests, pollsters have understandably thought this a good moment to inquire about American Catholics’ attitudes on religious matters. The results describe a major disconnection between the Roman Catholic Church and its American adherents.

St. Peter’s, NYC (source)

A New York Times survey conducted in February found, for example, that by roughly two to one or more, self-identified Catholics favored gay marriage, women priests, priests marrying, artificial means of birth control, access to abortion, and the death penalty – all ... More >