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Berkeley Professor Nicole Starosielski is leading the way in subsea cable network sustainability while also empowering the next generation to take the lead.

While many people may think satellites are responsible for telecommunications as we know it, the global subsea cable network actually carries more than 99% of the internet traffic between continents. Because of their marginal carbon footprint, subsea cables have often been excluded from internet sustainability studies, yet they have the most potential for providing sustainable communications infrastructure.

The New Yorker profiled David J. Peterson, who has created more than 50 fictional languages for films and television, including "Game of Thrones" and both recent Dune movies. Peterson graduated in 2003 with a dual major in English and Linguistics. From the article:

The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley... 

UC Berkeley will refurbish the Bancroft Dance Studio thanks to a generous gift by Daniel Hitchcock ’69, a mathematics and physics alum. Hitchcock provided the crucial funding to make the studio space safer and more accessible. The enhancements will include re-sanded floors, repaired windows, and a new water filtration system.

On February 28, the Berkeley Language Center and the Language and AI working group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities will be hosting a half-day conference Language and AI: Generating Interdisciplinary Connections and Possibilities.

Last year, Ashley Lawson, a communications major at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, had to take a journalism class online, even though the professor teaching the course was on her own campus.

Lawson was in the class with students from Lock Haven, Bloomsburg and Mansfield universities, which had been integrated in 2022 under the name Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania to reduce costs. The state schools had been running in the red and losing student population.

One of the most anticipated movies of the Holiday Season is due to hit cinemas on Christmas Day. The Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney, finally brings to the big screen Cal alum Daniel James Brown's mega-bestselling book about the American crew team that triumphed in the so-called Nazi Olympics of 1936.

After interning for a state senator in high school and noticing the predominance of men on the Capitol floor, Bettina Duval '82 knew she wanted to work toward more equitable politics. She later founded the California Women's List, a political action committee to elect women. She has also volunteered across campus and became chair in 2023 of the UC Berkeley Foundation (UCBF), which encourages private giving to Berkeley.

How would you define your undergraduate experience?

Brad Morgan and Julie Shin Morgan found their people at UC Berkeley. Julie’s best friend for life, Stella Sebastiani. Brad’s mentor, Paul Bartlett, and his first labmate, Yumi Nakagawa. And, at a party filled with chemistry students and church youth counselors, they fell for one another — “a small town Midwestern boy and a big city girl from LA,” as Brad said.

Moving to Berkeley had been a culture clash for both students in different ways, but they each welcomed the new perspectives. UC Berkeley taught them how to communicate, collaborate, and think critically.

The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said his mission was to “bear witness to the truth,” and he did so in ways that were impassioned, influential and enduring. Baldwin will be the subject of a symposium at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday where writers and artists will talk about his legacy. Here is a preview from my colleague Melissa Guerrero, who spoke with some of them:

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its thirty-first annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies to Michael Lucey, the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, for his book What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, published by the University of Chicago Press.