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6월 26일

Philosopher Mark Johnston asks, 'Is this our only life?'

When Princeton University Professor Mark Johnston's daughter was 18 months old, she stood on a beach with what he describes as a "quizzical philosophical look on her face, as if she was thinking, 'Is this my only life?'" That question is the heart of Johnston’s talk at UC Berkeley this past March, where he revisits a topic he wrote about two decades ago. Back then, he believed that the hope for an afterlife was impossible. But now, he has changed his mind. "Today, I want to show why I was wrong," says Johnston, author of the 2010 book Surviving Death. "That decent and comprehensible hope is not dashed by such ontological considerations. Even if we are essentially embodied somehow or other, our present embodiments may not be our only embodiments.” In this Berkeley Talks episode, Johnston explores through a secular lens how near-death experiences fail to provide decisive proof of a detached soul, how reductive materialism — the view that everything about the mind can ultimately be explained in physical terms — creates absurd ethical contradictions, and how viewing ourselves as "embodied wills" leaves open the possibility of a life to come. This talk took place on March 11, and was part of the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul sponsored by Berkeley Graduate Lectures. Watch a video of the lecture. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by by HoliznaCC0. Photo by Frank van Hulst via Unsplash. [Image of a person in a patterned sweater sits looking out at the ocean during sunset] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

6월 26일

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1시간 27분
5월 1일

How the American university’s success led to its modern challenges

While preparing his lectures for UC Berkeley, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber spent hours poring over the memoirs and writings of former University of California President Clark Kerr, seeking wisdom from the architect of California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. Reflecting on this research, Eisgruber notes that he found more than just strategy; he found a personal connection. "I have been impressed by Kerr's wit, wisdom and decency,” he says, “and I have come to feel not only admiration but affection for him.” In his first of two lectures at Berkeley in February, Eisgruber draws on Kerr’s 1963 “hinge of history” idea to explain why American research universities are especially vulnerable to political and social attacks today. Kerr believed there was a turning point in the mid-20th century where the role of universities shifted from the periphery of society to its center as primary engines of economic and social growth. Eisgruber contends that this newfound prominence made them higher-stakes targets for public and political frustration. He points to three post-1960s shifts — rising student debt, accelerating competition and universities’ high profile in national debates over racial justice — as forces that have "compromised the political base that can help to protect higher education in moments of crisis.” Still, Eisgruber remains optimistic about the resilience of the American research university. He highlights the sector's ability to drive global recovery during the pandemic and its success in broadening its reach to include talent from all walks of life as proof of its enduring strength. While its shift to the center of national life has invited new pressures, he argues that the intense public focus on these institutions confirms their role as vital spaces for a diverse democracy to do its most important thinking. He suggests that the path forward lies in universities embracing this central, if contested, role by sustaining the vision Kerr championed: "a truly American university, an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking to other models but serving as a model for universities in other parts of the globe.” This talk was one of two lectures that Eisgruber gave on Feb. 24 and Feb. 26 as part of the Clark Kerr Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, the Goldman School of Public Policy and Berkeley Law. Watch videos of both of Eisgruber’s lectures. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Photo via The Bancroft Library archive. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

5월 1일

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1시간 4분
6월 12일

Why kids need awe — and how puppets can help

As Halle Stanford drove through Topanga Canyon in Southern California, with Dolly Parton blasting from the car speakers, she was struck by a moment of inspiration. “I had this vision of a little hedgehog on the side of the road in her little pink hiking boots, with her guitar in her bag, out to find the wows of the world,” says Stanford, an independent television producer. A few days later, she came across research from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center showing that awe — the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand — inspires us to care for the planet and one another. “And I was like, ‘Bingo, that's it.’” That connection became the basis for Wowsabout, a new Jim Henson Company puppet preschool special on PBS designed to bring awe to young audiences. Created by Stanford and puppeteer Dorien Davies, the 30-minute special maps the journeys of Roxy, a free-spirited hedgehog, and Ronald, a fastidious city pig, as they explore Sequoia National Park. Together, they experience moments of awe, like when standing beneath towering Sequoias and watching migrating California tortoiseshell butterflies. And they meet others along the way, including Pekan, a puppet representing the endangered southern Sierra Nevada fisher who guides them to see historic pictographs carved into the park's rock formations. Awe isn’t a luxury emotion, but an evolutionary necessity, says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychology professor and the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. “It makes kids kinder, it makes kids more creative. … Awe really helps kids stay curious, and be in love with big ideas.” Keltner has studied the science of awe for more than a decade, and in 2023 published the book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. He served as a science consultant and co-executive producer for Wowsabout. In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Stanford and Davies join Keltner and others from the Greater Good Science Center — education director Vicki Zakrzewski and parenting program director Maryam Abdullah — in a talk moderated by Sarah Bracken, education outreach and school partnerships manager at the center. The group discusses the logistical hurdles of translating wonder into film and why cultivating everyday curiosity has become an essential antidote to modern social disconnection. The conversation took place on May 13 and was hosted by the Greater Good Science Center. Watch a video of the panel discussion. (The screening of Wowsabout was removed from the recording for copyright reasons.) Audiences can watch the full Wowsabout special for free on PBS Kids. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by by HoliznaCC0. Photo courtesy of The Jim Henson Company. It's a screenshot from Wowsabout that shows Ronald, the pig puppet, sitting on a mossy log in a forest campsite, smiling happily while holding a park booklet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

6월 12일

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58분
4월 16일

When better sleep becomes 'crisis work'

We all know sleep is important. But for those facing mental health challenges, research from UC Berkeley shows how good sleep is also foundational for treatment and recovery. Early results from a long‑term study at Berkeley’s Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic show that sleep is directly linked with our mental health and, when used alongside standard clinical treatments, can dramatically improve patients’ outcomes. “The finding keeps replicating: If you treat sleep, you’ll improve mental health symptoms,” says Allison Harvey, a Berkeley professor of psychology and director of the clinic who led the study. In 2017, Harvey and Daniel Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine expert at the University of Pittsburgh, published a book detailing a sleep tool they developed called the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian Intervention, or TSC. It includes a range of do-it-yourself sleep treatments, from regularizing wake-up times to detaching from digital devices before bed, that can help anyone get better rest. Mental health practitioners in county clinics across California are now using it to treat clients, with remarkable results: Not only has the TSC helped to decrease symptoms of psychosis, nearly two-thirds of people reported drinking less alcohol, and suicide-ideation severity was reduced for almost half of the clients. Emma Agnew, the clinic’s director for clinical implementation and partnerships at the time, has seen this impact firsthand. She says the data confirm a vital shift in how we approach mental health care: “Sleep treatment is literally something that is life-saving for people.” Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices). Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo via Unsplash; design by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley. Resources: Allison Harvey's UC Berkeley faculty profile pageEmma Agnew's websiteTreating Sleep Problems: A Transdiagnostic Approach (2017) by Allison Harvey and Daniel BuysseResearch on the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian InterventionThe Berkeley research team's recent webinars on sleep science Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

4월 16일

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27분
5월 15일

Musician Lara Downes celebrates the sound of America

It was the morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and pianist Lara Downes was catching a flight from California to Kentucky, where she was set to perform later in the evening. “It was a very weird day to be anywhere,” she recalls. That night, she performed songs from her album America Again in Louisville, a city that mirrored the country's own jagged political divide. Coming from California, Downes expected Louisville to feel tense after the election. Instead, she found that the music — curated to explore the “American Dream” through the lens of diverse composers like Florence Price and Morton Gould — created a shared space of mourning and hope that transcended the maps on the news. As she played pieces like Price’s “Fantasie Nègre” and Gould's “American Caprice,” Downes had a profound realization. "I think I learned in that moment how much all of the emotions that we feel about being American — the affection and the nostalgia and the confusion and the sadness and the anger — all of it really is expressed in the music,” she says. That idea — music as a shared emotional language — continues to shape Downes’ work today. In May, she brought an all-star cast of musicians to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall to join her on her newest project, This Land: Reflections on America. Alongside folk icon Judy Collins, poet Tarriona "Tank" Ball, the Austin-based string and bluegrass quartet Invoke, and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, she performed songs like the traditional African American spiritual “This Little Light Of Mine,” Paul Simon’s “America” and Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.” The performance reflects Downes’ ongoing effort to explore what it means to be American through music — a question that also led her to create The Declaration Project, a national initiative tied to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States. For the project, Downes spent two years traveling the country to ask Americans from all backgrounds what “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” means to them today. In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Downes joins NPR’s Chloe Veltman in a pre-concert talk to discuss how music isn’t just a performance, but a common language to explore the American experience. The May 9 performance and pre-concert talk were part of Cal Performances’ Illuminations: Exile and Sanctuary series and marked the final performance of the season. Learn more about Cal Performances’ upcoming 2026-27 programming. The musical selections featured in this episode are from This Land: Reflections on America, performed by Lara Downes and guest artists. All music was used with permission. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small. Intro music by by HoliznaCC0. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

5월 15일

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30분
4월 17일

Alison Gopnik on why AI is no match for a 4-year-old

Over her decadeslong career as a developmental psychologist, Alison Gopnik has observed a striking phenomenon: When children are given a new toy without an obvious use, they often outperform high‑achieving college students in figuring out how it works. While adults tend to test the most likely possibilities and quickly get stuck, children respond with playful experimentation. "What children are doing is exactly the kind of open-ended, non-utilitarian, exploratory learning that allows you to find out things about the world that you would never find out any other way,” says Gopnik, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. In this Berkeley Talks episode, Gopnik argues that human intelligence is not a single, general capacity, but a collection of distinct cognitive modes — exploration, exploitation and care — that are distributed across different stages of a person’s life. Childhood, she says, is evolution’s way of creating a dedicated “explorer” phase, made possible by a specialized care system provided by adults. "The reason why we can have these big brains," she explains, "is because we have this period of childhood where we're protected ... and we have those older people who are there to provide the resources.” Gopnik contrasts this biological model with current artificial intelligence, noting that while large language models excel at using existing data to predict patterns, it lacks the embodied, curiosity‑driven learning of a child. To create truly intelligent systems, she suggests that we need to focus on the “intelligence of care.” “A system that develops, that changes over time, and in particular, a system that's cared for by humans or cared for by other intelligent agents — that's the secret of human intelligence,” she says. “That's the kind of system you'd need if you wanted a system that had the same kind of intelligence as humans.” This lecture took place on Nov. 5, 2025, as part of the Berkeley Distinguished Faculty Lectures in the Social Sciences. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. UC Berkeley photo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

4월 17일

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1시간 25분
3월 20일

First a plague, then a fire: How a changing city rebuilt the modern stage

When William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, the power of London’s theater lived almost entirely in language. The stage was mostly bare and the scenery imagined. To mark a shift in setting, an actor might simply declare, “This is the Forest of Arden.” But by the mid-17th century, this mode of performance began to change. Following decades of civil war and Puritan rule, King Charles II’s 1660 restoration of the monarchy reopened public theaters that had been closed for nearly two decades. It marked the beginning of the Restoration era, when movable scenery debuted — massive painted flats slid along wooden grooves, transforming the stage in seconds — and women, immigrants, servants and enslaved people first moved across it as performers and stagehands. The English stage became a space of motion, a vivid counterpart to a London rebuilt after the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of 1666. In this Berkeley Talks episode, UC Berkeley Professor Julia Fawcett discusses her 2025 book Moveable Londons: Performance and the Modern City, which traces how this mechanical innovation echoed a deeper cultural one. It was, she says, a “revolution in English performance” that redefined movement, agency and belonging in a rapidly changing city. And that revolution, she contends, provided the template not only for modern theater’s moving sets, star actresses and illusionistic stages, but also for ways of moving through — and belonging in — the modern city. Fawcett’s talk, which took place on Feb. 11, 2025, was part of a Berkeley Book Chats event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. She was in conversation with Joshua Gang, an associate professor of English at Berkeley. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Image from Moveable Londons book cover. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

3월 20일

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44분
2월 6일

An evolutionary biologist makes the case for pausing AI

In the early 20th century, factory workers — later known as the “Radium Girls” — were hired to paint watch and instrument dials with radium‑based luminous paint. They were instructed to keep their brushes sharp by shaping them with their lips. In the following years, many of these workers developed devastating illnesses, including severe bone and jaw damage, anemia and cancer, that were ultimately traced to chronic radium exposure. For Holly Elmore, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of PauseAI US — an organization that seeks a global pause to advanced AI development — this tragedy is a stark warning for our current era. In a talk she gave Dec. 9 for the Berkeley AI Risk Speaker Series, Elmore argues that we’re repeating this mistake with artificial intelligence by assuming we can safely play with a technology we don't fully understand. “The expectation of many people in AI safety, for many years, has been that when we got to this point, the AI, once it was aligned, would figure out the answers for us,” she says. But Elmore warns that this approach is like clearing a minefield by walking through it. As AI capabilities grow, she says, the probability of accidents increases — and unlike minor software glitches, these could be "one-shot" events that we cannot recover from. She points to risks ranging from the automated assembly of bioweapons to the unpredictable disruption of the social and environmental systems we depend on for survival. Instead of waiting for a machine to solve its own safety problems, she contends that experiments with such high-stakes technology are too costly to continue without a pause. “The scale of the danger really could cripple civilization or cause extinction,” she says, “and the possibility of this alone is reason enough to pursue pausing frontier AI development.” Watch a video of Elmore’s talk. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Photo courtesy of PauseAI. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2월 6일

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52분
2025. 11. 14.

The complicated role of media in motherhood

In the early 20th century, prominent figures in psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics in the U.S. began to promote a new standard for mothers: that they should serve as a constant, unchanging and wholly nurturing presence in their children’s lives. It was the best way, they claimed, to raise healthy and successful children. This ideal marked a shift away from earlier traditions where caregiving was often distributed among extended family members, hired help and community. In her new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, UC Berkeley associate professor Hannah Zeavin explores how the new ideal of constant mothering was advanced by the mind sciences during the rise of the nuclear family and became especially powerful for white, middle-class mothers. Yet this expectation was both unrealistic and deeply shaped by issues of race and class, says Zeavin, who spoke last month at a Berkeley Book Chats event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. As more mothers entered the workforce and social changes disrupted older forms of caregiving, media researchers began to explore whether technology could step in, imagining devices — first, baby monitors and later, TVs and tablets — as substitutes for, or supplements to, maternal care. In this Berkeley Talks episode, Zeavin discusses how these ideals and interventions — defining the “perfect mother,” substituting media for maternal presence and punishing deviations from the norm — continue to influence American family life today. Watch a video of the conversation, which was moderated by Ramsey McGlazer, associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Screenshot of the Mother Media book cover. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2025. 11. 14.

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53분
2월 20일

The rule of law depends on the courage of judges

In 1957, 6-year-old Bernice Bouie Donald started first grade in rural DeSoto County, Mississippi. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school segregation three years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, the young girl’s educational reality remained unchanged: Her all-Black school was a two-room cinderblock building with no indoor plumbing, and her books were hand-me-downs discarded by white students. Donald went on to have a decadeslong career as a federal judge, and at a recent UC Berkeley Law event, she shared her personal memories to highlight a sobering truth: The rule of law is not self-executing. For the promise of Brown to reach her classroom, Donald explained, it required "extreme moral courage" from judges who faced bombings, social ostracization and death threats to enforce the law. Without that bravery, she warned, the law is "simply words on a piece of paper." This ongoing challenge was at the heart of a Dec. 5, 2025, panel discussion featuring Donald and a group of legal experts. Together, the panelists discussed the rising tide of personal and political threats facing the judiciary, exploring how modern pressures — from social media harassment to political tribalism — threaten the independence necessary for a fair society. The event was part of “Conversations in Civil Justice,” a webinar series presented by UC Berkeley Law’s Civil Justice Research Initiative and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Judicial Institute. The series is supported by a gift from the American Association for Justice’s Robert L. Habush Endowment. The panelists include: Bernice Bouie Donald, a retired judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Philip Pro, a retired federal judge from the District of Nevada.Amrit Singh, a professor of professional practice and faculty director of the Rule of Law Lab at New York University School of Law. Jeremy Fogel (moderator), executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a retired federal judge from the Northern District of California.Richard Jolly (moderator), professor at Southwestern Law School and senior fellow at the Civil Justice Research Initiative.Watch a video of the discussion. Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks). Music by HoliznaCC0. Photo via Unsplash. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2월 20일

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58분

Podcasts by UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs