Jeff Chang will be speaking Nov. 29 at the Hillside Club for Berkeley Arts & Letters. Photo: Jeremy Keith Villaluz Hours after Donald Trump was elected president, UC Berkeley students and others took to the streets to protest a man they felt was unsuited to lead the United States. The next day, 1,500 Berkeley High […]
Berkeley Arts & Letters
Posted inArts
Christine Carter to talk about managing life’s complexities
Christine Carter. Photo: Blake Farrington By Jill Suttie In 2009, Christine Carter felt like she had it all. Working her dream job at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, she was helping further the study and dissemination of the science of happiness. She had two wonderful kids, a best-selling book called Raising Happiness, a […]
Posted inEvents
The It List: Five things to do in Berkeley this weekend
Head downtown Friday night to participate in the city’s holiday tree lighting ritual. Photo: DBA/YouTube HOLIDAY TREE LIGHTING Thanksgiving is behind us, and the winter holidays are just around the corner. Downtown Berkeley is kicking off the season with its third annual Holiday Tree Lighting Celebration. It’s exactly what it sounds like — plus baked goods, holiday crafts for […]
Posted inArts
An all too black comedy of unintended consequences
You probably know that you and I — actually, all of us collectively, homo sapiens the species — are responsible for a truly alarming reduction in the number of other species on Planet Earth. But apart from occasional stories in the media about endangered polar bears and black rhinos and the like, you may feel, […]
Posted inArts
Spying on Democracy: Author details rise in surveillance
Heidi Boghosian. Photo by Nina Subin In the last few months, Americans’ expectations about government interference in their lives has been turned completely upside down. Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown that the National Security Agency has paid millions to Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as telephone companies, for data about its customers. The […]
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Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Do we die a good death?
Katy Butler. Photo: Cristina Taccone Katy Butler was living in Mill Valley, pursuing a successful freelance writing career, when she got the call we all dread: her father, a successful, dynamic 79-year-old retired Wesleyan professor, had had a debilitating stroke. Butler flew back to Middletown, Conn. and unknowingly entered into an nine-year medical and moral […]
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Khaled Hosseini: ‘All fiction is characters facing a choice’
Khaled Hosseini: in conversation with Berkeleyside’s Frances Dinkelspiel on Sunday June 23 for a Berkeley Arts & Letters event. Khaled Hosseini: in conversation with Berkeleyside’s Frances Dinkelspiel on Sunday June 23 for a Berkeley Arts & Letters event. If you are ever stranded on that proverbial deserted island, you might hope to have author Khaled […]
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Is the web skewing our world view? An author says yes
Eli Pariser. Photo: jdlasica Eli Pariser calls himself an “online organizer and disorganizer,” and, as the former executive director of Berkeley’s MoveOn.org and founder of Avaaz.org, he’s had plenty of chances to use the web to encourage social change. All that experience reaching out through the Internet led Pariser to start scrutinizing how we get […]
Posted inArts, Business, Community
Book bares truth about false incest accusation
Bay Area author Meredith Maran has been chronicling her life and the world around her since the mid 1990s. Her memoir, What It’s Like to Live Now, which was a Chronicle bestseller, and Notes From an Incomplete Revolution, detailed what it was like to come out as a lesbian, raise two sons in a marginal […]
Posted inArts, Events
Author Peter Carey makes Berkeley his Bay Area stop
Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey will be making his only Bay Area appearance on May 5 at the First Congressional Church of Berkeley. Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda and Illywhacker, will be talking about his most recent novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, in which he reimagines Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to and through […]
