Berkeley Talks

In  Berkeley Talks  episode 181, renowned artist and human rights activist Ai WeiWei discusses art, exile and politics in a conversation with noted theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars and Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Ai, who grew up in northwest China under har...

In  Berkeley Talks  episode 180, Dania Matos and Fabrizio Mejia, vice chancellor and associate vice chancellor, respectively, for UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, join Berkeley student Angelica Garcia to discuss the campus’s Latinx Thriving Initiatives (LTI) and how these efforts are supporting Berkeley’s goal of not only becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), but...

In  Berkeley Talks  episode 179, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reads several poems, including "The Mud Sermon," "The Bicycle Eclogue" and "After the Hurricane." His April reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event Lunch Poems. "I take this voyage into poetry very seriously," begins Hutchinson, "and take none of it for granted, because of the weight of history, bot...

In  Berkeley Talks  episode 178, Rashad Arman Timmons, a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, joins in conversation with the family of Michael Brown Jr., whose 2014 killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited a wave of protests across the country. During the March 8, 2023, discussion, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., his stepmother, Cal Brown, and Timmons cons...

In Berkeley Talks episode 177, a panel of scholars discusses theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and how his years at UC Berkeley shaped him, and how he shaped the university. Oppenheimer, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s summer 2023 film  Oppenheimer,  came to Berkeley in 1929 as an assistant professor and over the next dozen years established one of the greatest schools of th...

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Jessica Morse, the deputy secretary for forest and wildland resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency, discusses the current wildfire crisis in California and how we got here, strategies the state is implementing, and lessons they've learned in order to decrease catastrophic wildfires and create more resilient forests. Morse began her Nov. 4, 2022, lectu...

Siri creator Adam Cheyer talks about the long road to launching the virtual assistant, how to take an entrepreneurial idea from conception to impact and why he doesn't see anything as a failure. "An entrepreneur and a magician are exactly the same," begins Cheyer, who also founded the startups Change.org, Viv Labs, Sentient and Bixby. "An entrepreneur needs to imagine an impossible future. Th...

In this episode, three leading legal scholars — john a. powell, director of UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI); Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law; and Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown Law School — discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public and private universities cannot use race as a factor in admitting students. The court, with its conservati...

In this episode, three poets laureate — Lee Herrick, the first Asian American poet laureate of California; Kealoha, Hawai'i’s first poet laureate; and Nadia Elbgal, the Oakland youth poet laureate — perform and read their works in celebration of National Poetry Month in April. Kealoha, a slam champion who has a degree in nuclear physics from MIT, began by performing a scene from his film, The Stor...

Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and chief economist to the Investing in America Cabinet, discusses Biden's plan to build a clean energy economy in the U.S.  "The president has made clear, I feel like gazillions of times at this point, that his goal is to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out," began Boushey at the March 22 event a...

Journalist and climate activist Naomi Klein joins Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen and posthumanist thinker Bayo Akomolafe, both senior fellows at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, to discuss climate grief and why they see it not as a reason for apathy, but as an invitation to feel the loss deeply — together — and to use it as fuel for collective action. "The moments that we face lo...

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Natalie Wolchover, a senior editor at Quanta   Magazine and winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting, gives the keynote commencement speech to the Class of 2023 at Berkeley Physics "'Knowledge is power,' my grandpa always used to tell me," said Wolchover at the May 14 ceremony. "Well, I think knowledge of physics is a superpower. We tend to fo...

In this episode, two Ph. D. graduates in sociology — Kristen Nelson and Mario Castillo — give the graduate student address at the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology's spring commencement ceremony. "Like many of you, I was raised by a single mother," said Castillo at the May 19 event. "Her name is Mariana Leticia Castillo, and she was 17 when I was born. Now, I have tried to imagine what a 16-year...

In an impassioned keynote address to graduates of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy , Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones urged them to do three things: disrupt, dismantle, discover. "We are here to disrupt, not just in word, but with our very presence," he said at the May 14 ceremony. "I come standing with my ancestry. I come in a building as a first non-white member to represent my dis...

Magda Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University and author of the 2020 book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth , discusses how an anti-Jewish lie that originated in medieval Europe has persisted throughout history and spread antisemitism across the world. Known as blood libel, the superstitious accusation — that Jews ritually sacrific...

UC Berkeley alumnus John Schulman, the lead developer of ChatGPT , talks about how AI language models sometimes make things up — often convincingly — and offers solutions on how to fix this problem. Schulman's talk, which took place on April 19, was part of a series of public lectures at Berkeley this spring by the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence. Listen to the episode and read...

Award-winning journalists — Arezou Rezvani, Jane Ferguson, Zahra Joya and Berkeley Journalism Dean Geeta Anand — discuss women’s rights in Iran and Afghanistan, and the challenges of reporting as women and about women in these countries. “I was last in Afghanistan in November of 2021, so the Taliban had been in control for several months,” says Ferguson, a PBS NewsHour correspondent. "Obviously, y...

Jitendra Malik, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, gives the 2023 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture called, "The sensorimotor road to artificial intelligence." "It's my pleasure to talk on this very, very hot topic today," Malik begins. "But I'm going to talk about natural intelligence first because we can't talk about artificial intelligenc...

Uwe Westphal, author of the 2019 book, Fashion Metropolis Berlin 1836-1939: The Story of the Rise and Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry , discusses Berlin's once-thriving Jewish fashion industry and how the Nazi confiscations of Jewish-owned companies in the years before World War II led to the industry's demise. "The destruction of the entire fashion industry meant forced labor, governme...

To mark the first anniversary of Russia’s initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are sharing a panel discussion with four leading economists about what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine. In this Feb. 14 talk, the panelists summarize trends in the region before the war, assess war damage and propose paths forward, laying the groundwork for future recovery efforts and increasing the chances of post-...

In celebration of the new book, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, Judy Juanita, Madalynn Rucker and Ericka Huggins discuss their time with the Black Panther Party. "I knew that my big purpose was to learn how to love because I was raised in a community that was not loved," says Ericka Huggins, who co-authored Comrade Sisters with photographer Stephen Shames and was director of Oak...

World-renowned South African artist William Kentridge discusses the process of making the 2019 chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl. He also touches on why artists should stay open to new ideas, the complex relationship between humans and algorithms — "one has to make space for that which does not compute," he says — and the "unavoidable optimism" in the activity of making. During the 2022-23 acade...

Adriana Green, a Ph. D. student in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, and Nadia Ellis, an associate professor in the Department of English , discuss Sarah Broom's The Yellow House , winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The memoir, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East, tells a hundred years of her family and their relation...

In episode #158 of Berkeley Talks, we revisit a lecture by Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center , in which she discusses happiness — what it means, where it comes from and how we can enhance it in our lives. “Where does happiness come from?” asks Simon-Thomas, who co-teaches the  Science of Happiness , an online course that explores the roots of...

Hilary Hoynes, a UC Berkeley professor of economics and of public policy, and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities, discusses the emerging research that examines how the social safety net in the United States — a collection of public programs that delivers aid to low-income populations — affects children's life trajectories. Read a transcript and listen to the episode on Berkeley News....