Humans are a super-collective species that succeeds through cooperation and community, says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. But power and privilege, she says, can corrupt anyone — even the best, most morally guided people. “Social hierarchy is an interesting moderator of our empathic, nurturing, compassionate tendencies,” she says. The good news? There’s an antidote. (A podcast episode featuring this interview with Simon-Thomas was origi...
Mar 30, 2021•12 min
"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 ...
Mar 16, 2021•11 min
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 UC Berkeley News : https://news.berkel...
Mar 09, 2021•2 min
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...
Mar 02, 2021•12 min
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 the transcript on UC Berkeley News : https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/22/after-thoughts-dacher-keltner-on-awe-and-psychedelics 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 inte...
Feb 22, 2021•2 min
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 c...
Feb 16, 2021•14 min
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 inc...
Feb 02, 2021•11 min
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 ...
Nov 24, 2020•7 min
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 afte...
Nov 20, 2020•10 min
When Savala Trepczynski, the director of the social justice center at UC Berkeley, first heard the decision in the Breonna Taylor case — that only one of three police officers involved in Taylor's killing in March was indicted on charges of reckless endangerment — 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 yo...
Sep 25, 2020•16 min
"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. "Eve...
Feb 11, 2020•10 min
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 UC Berkeley News : ht...
Jan 21, 2020•9 min
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 ...
Dec 17, 2019•16 min
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 ...
Nov 26, 2019•8 min
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 ...
Nov 25, 2019•9 min
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 UC Berkeley News : https://news.berke...
Oct 08, 2019•5 min
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 floati...
Jul 09, 2019•20 min
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. S...
Jun 11, 2019•11 min
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 growi...
May 28, 2019•8 min
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 be...
Apr 30, 2019•17 min
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...
Apr 16, 2019•17 min
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...
Mar 18, 2019•6 min
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...
Mar 11, 2019•7 min
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 wil...
Mar 04, 2019•6 min
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 ...
Feb 19, 2019•6 min
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...
Feb 11, 2019•11 min
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 ba...
Jan 22, 2019•12 min
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. H...
Dec 11, 2018•9 min
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 ...
Nov 20, 2018•8 min
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 an...
Nov 05, 2018•18 min
