Social Sciences

Daniela Castellanos credits UC Berkeley's Gender and Women's Studies Department with helping her find her voice.

Castellanos, who graduated from Cal last month with a bachelor's degree in Gender and Women's Studies and minors in human rights and Spanish, said growing up in a conservative environment and a traditional Mexican family exposed her to strict gender roles. She struggled to speak up for herself, and felt she let others walk all over...

AI platforms like ChatGPT are widely understood to be sophisticated prediction machines. Trained on vast troves of content ranging from news articles and books to film scripts and Reddit posts, they anticipate the next most likely letters and words when prompted. While their responses can give the impression they’re sentient thinkers, that sci-fi scenario hasn’t yet panned out.

But new UC Berkeley research reveals for the first time that AI chatbots can now analyze sentences like a trained linguist. The study...

Today we are revisiting an October 2023 Berkeley Talks episode in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties liberal governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. He joins in a conversation with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

“To have the...

Political Economy Alumna Rachel Kushner wrote an op-ed that was published in The New York Times.

People who earned their bachelor’s degree from an Ivy tend to let you know, even decades after graduating. It’s in their author bio, or on their X handle. My degree from the University of California, Berkeley, never seemed like a detail worth mentioning, unless someone explicitly asks me where I went to college, in which case my instinct is to explain that it was easier to get in when I attended.

That I share this alma mater with, say, Joan Didion, never...