TRIGGER WARNING: This article or section, and a page it links to, contains information about sexual assault and abuse, which may be triggering to survivors. One man put his hand on the head of another, someone took a picture of it, and the image set off a social media frenzy. Yes. An image. This image. … Continue reading »
25 years later and the Rodney King video is still on repeat
Twenty five years ago this month, the video of Rodney King being beaten, clubbed, kicked, and stomped by a gang of police went viral before going viral was a thing. Eighty-nine seconds of unmistakable brutality repeatedly looped, dissected, and discussed. A year later, the defense attorney’s frame-by-frame deconstruction of King’s beating successfully convinced an all … Continue reading »
Harper Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates: Race in literature in 2015
Two of the most important books on race released in 2015, the exhumed novel, Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s sequel to the award-winning classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ long-form letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me, were published the same day. This fortuitous historical footnote is all … Continue reading »
Five ways to build caring community on social media
As news of the terrorist attacks in Paris spread through social media, responses followed a pattern I’ve come to know well. First, shock and grief. Friends and followers share video and pictures that are almost pornographic in their deracinated intensity. The images appear with no context, and we see only running, screaming, guns, and blood. … Continue reading »
Healing Cuba
One can scarcely open a travel magazine or newspaper in these months in the thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations without finding something about the vibrant art scene in Havana — about the jazz clubs like La Zorra y el Cuervo and Jazz Café; about dancing to the rhythms of son; about alleyways turned into improvisational public … Continue reading »
Performing destruction: cultural heritage, looting and ISIS
If you use Twitter or Facebook, you’ve likely seen hundreds of news articles, reports, videos, and blog posts on the violent destruction of cultural heritage that has intensified in Syria during the past few months. As an archaeologist, my news-feeds are always a-buzz with the latest updates on all things archaeology — but it’s not what … Continue reading »
Amid growing inequality, Chekhov’s message resonates
Our work together as cast, crew and designers — developing our upcoming Theater, Dance and Performance Studies production — has led us all to a deeper understanding of why The Cherry Orchard, written and set in Russia in 1904, has so often been called “timeless” and “universal.” One need only scratch the surface of the play … Continue reading »
Fencing University House: the symbolism, economics, and practicality
There is a plan to build a fence around University House, the chancellor’s residence on the northern portion of the campus, to increase the security of the occupants. Now on its third design iteration and already through the campus review process, the construction is poised to move forward. The safety of the chancellor is essential, … Continue reading »
Cell phone etiquette
People have been complaining about bad cell phone behavior for years. What are the 21st century’s Emily Post rules for cell phones and texting? (For the millennials: Emily Post was the great doyenne of etiquette and manners advice in the 20th century. Her descendants still produce advice books under her name. And there actually are new-era Emily … Continue reading »
Uganda workshop to strengthen response to wartime sexual violence
The Missing Peace Practitioners’ Workshop—co-hosted by the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law—brought together more than 100 people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Liberia, in Kampala, Uganda, last week to talk about sexual violence during and after armed conflict. Contributing to recent global efforts to highlight and … Continue reading »
Black by choice?
A couple of weeks back, we witnessed two quite different but intriguing cases of people laying claim to an African-American identity without having the lineage that we generally assume provides that identity – biological descent from African slaves in the United States. These two people were, in effect, asserting that they could choose to be … Continue reading »
Chez Chimp: Why our primate cousins don’t cook
Once upon a time, the list of behaviors that absolutely distinguished humans and non-human primates was clear and well defined. Tool use, language, organized group violence, some more debatable than others, but research on each of these has established that it no longer clearly defines a human leap forward. Can we can add another activity to … Continue reading »
Attaining adulthood
One of the deep, long-term changes in American lives has been what social historians call the “standardization” of the life course. From the 19th into the 20th century, increasingly more young Americans were able to follow a common sequence: get educated, get a job, leave parents’ home, get married, have children, and become financially secure … Continue reading »
Othering, Belonging, and Impermanence
I’m writing to you from the Othering & Belonging conference in Oakland, California, sponsored by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. I wanted to attend because of the title: it’s rare that a conference will try to dialectically encompass both a problem and a solution in its own name. The name suggests both dystopian … Continue reading »
“Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid”…
That’s the beginning of the headline on an article in Britain’s The Guardian published on April 24. Alan Yuhas, the reporter from The Guardian, has done a super job in this report of balancing comments from specialists with an attempt to convey what is exciting here. Since I ended up quoted rather a lot (considering that … Continue reading »
Abe Lincoln
Wednesday was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. It’s hard to spend too much time reflecting on Lincoln; I use the first thing he ever published, comparing two infrastructure projects in a local election campaign, as an example of policy analysis avant la lettre, and he just gets better and better from there. Even … Continue reading »
What Rolling Stone magazine should learn from social science
The most recent scandal about avoidably erroneous reporting is symptomatic of a trend towards agenda-driven research and away from evidence-based research. On 19 November 2014, the magazine Rolling Stone published a 9,000-word article alleging that on 29 September 2012 seven men sexually assaulted a fellow undergraduate student (pseudonym “Jackie”) at a fraternity on the University … Continue reading »
Sunni Islamic authority between the text and context
The ongoing chaos in many parts of the Muslim world can, in part, be traced to the collapse of Sunni Islamic authority and the emergence of various groupings claiming to fill the vacuum. While all agree that the collapse is a reality, dating the collapse is as difficult as the attempts to fill it. Some … Continue reading »
The government we deserve/The unexpected virtue of ignorance
At the most recent Oscars, the Academy recognized the talents of numerous Mexicans who worked on the acclaimed film Birdman. During his acceptance speech for the Best Director award, Alejandro González Iñárritu made two statements meant to resonate with Mexicans living on both sides of the Mexico-United States border. In regard to those Mexicans living … Continue reading »
How does it feel to be a Muslim?
Events in the Arab and Muslim world direct me again back to W.E.B. Du Bois and the pressing question in his book, The Souls of Black Folk— how does it feel to be a problem? The question posed by Du Bois in relations to African Americans and the problem of race in America has not … Continue reading »