Arts & Humanities

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope, is a disturbing one:Two men in their shared apartment strangle a former classmate to death. Then, they host guests — including the victim’s family — at a dinner party. It’s an attempt to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder.”

Although the killers — Brandon and Phillip — live together, it’s never acknowledged openly that they’re a couple. (At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion,” which included homosexuality, on the big screen.)

It’s a classic...

Jeff Davis’ workspace is rare: It’s UC Berkeley’s iconic Campanile, one of the world’s tallest clock-and-bell towers and home to 20 tons of ancient fossils, a famous falcon family and its centerpiece — a 61-bell grand carillon.

But Davis’ position as university carillonist and the teaching program he’s built on campus are just as rare. Davis, who is retiring July 1 at the age of 80, is one of only six full-time paid university carillonists in North America. And...

A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a classroom.

Although it sounds like a premise for a joke, this was actually the origin of a unique collaboration between Nobel Prize–winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell and the psychologist Rob MacCoun. Spurred by what they saw as a perilously rising tide of irrationality, misinformation and sociopolitical polarization, they teamed up in 2011 to create a multidisciplinary course at the University of California, Berkeley, with the modest goal of teaching undergraduate students how to think—more...

Viet Thanh Nguyen emerged from UC Berkeley with more than a diploma.

In fact, he earned three (but who’s counting?) — dual bachelor’s degrees in English and ethnic studies in 1992, and a doctorate in English in ’97.

But his education wasn’t confined by the walls of a classroom.

Nguyen became steeped in activism, leaving Berkeley with “four misdemeanors, three diplomas, two arrests, and an abiding belief in solidarity, liberation, and the power of the people and the power of art,” he recalls in his memoir, 2023’s A Man of Two Faces.