Berkeley Talks

In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Berkeley Law professor Franklin Zimring, author of the 2017 book When Police Kill, discusses why police kill far more citizens in the United States than in other developed countries.

"About 1,000 times a year in the United States, civilians are shot and killed by local police, and the authorities say that such killings were either necessary or at least justified," began Zimring. "... That's three killings a day, every day. And that's too many violent deaths in a country which already suffers from an excess of violent death."

Zimring's March 29 lecture, "Police Killings: An American Tragedy," was part of the 2021 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture series.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Bess Williamson, associate professor of art history theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Accessible America, explores the history of design and its response to disability rights, from the end of World War II to the present day.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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"I think that part of why we are lost is that we've forgotten we have to study where we've come from and what we're doing," said novelist Alice Walker at a UC Berkeley event last month. "And I just can't stress enough how much I want our people — all people, but, you know, our people — to really get a grip on how you have to understand where you've been in order to know where you are or where you're going."

Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her novel, The Color Purple, was in conversation on Feb. 15, 2021, with Ra Malika Imhotep, a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley, and Darieck Scott, a professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, as part of the department's spring 2021 Critical Conversations series.

Walker's parting advice?

"Study, be free, enjoy your life, dance when you feel like dancing, sleep outside under the moon ... Live your life. Live it. I don't care if every time you open your mouth, somebody's ready to throw something at you or trip you up or lie about you. The joy of being here, I think, only comes if you are really here as you."

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, former Google design ethicist and star of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, discusses how fake news spreads faster than factual news — a result of citizens sharing emotionally resonant misinformation or disinformation, often weaponized for profit and propaganda purposes, while tech algorithms amplify the viral spread.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Charles Henry, professor emeritus of African American studies at UC Berkeley and author of Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations, discusses why reparations are gaining mainstream support, why he believes they are a solution and what could enable Black Americans to feel "acknowledged, redressed and with closure."

This talk, given in October of 2020, is part of "America's Unfinished Work," a series by Berkeley's Osher Lifelong Learning Center (OLLI).

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Martha Olney, a teaching professor of economics at UC Berkeley, discusses the economic forecast — how the post-pandemic U.S. economy might compare to that of the so-called roaring 1920s.

"When I studied the 1920s, I was really focused on consumer spending, particularly household spending for durable goods — cars, appliances, furniture, jewelry — and the role of installment credit in making a boom in consumer durables possible," Olney said on UCLA's Forecast Direct in January.

But, she said, today, much of the nation's consumer spending is on services — going to restaurants, getting a haircut — which lengthens the time it takes to recover from a recession.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, a former Berkeley Journalism professor and alumnus, discusses his 1989 documentary, Tongues Untied, during a screening of his groundbreaking film at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1990.

In Tongues Untied, an experimental and deeply personal film, Riggs combines documentary footage with poetry, dance, music and performance with his own on-camera revelations to explore Black gay love and sexuality in the U.S. At the end of the film, words flash on the screen: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this Berkeley Talks episode, we revisit an interview that we first shared in 2019:

Growing up in an immigrant family, comedian Maz Jobrani knew his parents wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, maybe an engineer. When he became a comedian, he says, the whole community was sad for the family. "They were like, 'Did you hear about Jobrani's son? Yeah, it's a shame. He's almost a drug dealer."

In February 2019, Jobrani was a guest on the Science of Happiness, a podcast from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In his episode, called "Notice the Good in Your Life," Jobrani talks with host Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor and the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, about his 2017 stand-up special on Netflix, Immigrant.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Aria Aber, a poet born to Afghan refugees and raised in Germany, who now lives in Oakland, California, reads from her first book of poems, Hard Damage, published in 2019. The early November reading was part of the UC Berkeley Library’s monthly event, Lunch Poems.

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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In this episode of Berkeley Talks, experts discuss the forces that shaped the outcome of the U.S. elections in November and the implications of the elections for the U.S. and the countries of Latin America.

"Hispanics are the new swing voters," said Maria Escheveste, a senior scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and president and CEO of the Opportunity Institute, who joined Paul Pierson, a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Colombian investigative journalist Daniel Coronell, at the Nov. 20, 2020 campus webinar.

It's imperative that Democrats realize that the Latinx community isn't a monolith, she said, and that immigration isn't the only issue every Latinx person cares about. "We are so diverse because we're generationally diverse — linguistically, racially, ethnically," said Escheveste. "Demography is not destiny."

Listen to the discussion and read a transcript on Berkeley News.

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