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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.

Andrew F. Jones, Louis B. Agassiz Professor in Chinese, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture.

Dozens of documentaries about cults are currently available on Netflix, Hulu, and Max, along with countless podcasts on Spotify, Apple, and other platforms. What's driving this trend? What's behind our collective fascination with communities and spiritualities that offer total belonging and total enthrallment?

A criminal justice major at UC San Diego, Dominique Fawn Hill was just like many students at UC Berkeley, wondering if her studies were something she truly enjoyed, or just something that paid the bills. She decided to take a costume practice class for fun and, realizing that this could be both a profession and a passion, has pursued costume design ever since.

Our next interview will be with a PhD student in the English Department: Noor Asif. I first met Noor because she was my GSI for English 45C, which was one of the first English classes I took at Berkeley, and which covers literature from the mid-19th through the mid-20th century. The class taught me so much about the ways to go about studying, and writing about, literature. Noor also is an editor for a magazine called Parapraxis, which focuses on psychoanalysis, and she previously studied art history.