Humanities (Audio)

Abigail Pogrebin is the author of the recently published book, My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew. Hear how she spent 12 months researching and observing every holiday in the Jewish calendar. Series: "Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33750]

Members of the Cal Boxing team train in the basement of the Recreational Sports Facility. It was here, in the basement, where Jacque Garcia learned her craft from scratch, where she earned the respect of her coach and peers en route to becoming the president of Cal Boxing, and where she stewed over a semifinal defeat in the 2017 National Collegiate Boxing Association (NCBA) national tournament. It's also where she shows off her 132-pound NCBA championship belt, her Outstanding Boxer Award and the Cal Boxing women's third-place team award she helped win the following year. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34022]

UC Berkeley researchers are using an exceptional stash of 1,500 fossils found during the construction of a new San Francisco East Bay dam to piece together a picture of what the Bay Area may have looked like some 15-20 million years ago. Water covered much of the region, ancient whales sifted food over what is now Berkeley and Oakland, while now-extinct megalodon sharks might have hunted dolphins over San Jose. Hippo-like creatures waded along the coast, which was dotted with palm and pine trees. Seals, larger than today, frolicked in the water. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34000]

How it is possible for imagination to have practical social effects? The great potential size of human societies, in contrast to those of other primates, is due to a kind of shared imagination of which kinship and religion are important examples, says Maurice Bloch, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Bloch says that the shared imaginary emerges in normal life at certain moments yet is still governed by the potential of imagination. The lecture is illustrated by Bloch’s experience of an isolated village in Madagascar. [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 33941]

UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Architecture Ronald Rael’s “Cabin of Curiosities” is a livable, water-tight structure in Oakland that was unveiled in May 2018. With succulents growing off the exterior walls and a translucent interior, the cabin catches the eye and inspires wonder. What makes the structure unique, however, is not its beauty, but the fact that nearly every element of the cabin was constructed out of 3D-printed materials. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33997]

Gwyneth Paltrow, Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Emmy-winning actress, appeared in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001. After a recent screening at UC Santa Barbara, she discussed the film and more. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33950]

UCSB Pollock Theater Director Matt Ryan and crew meet Comic-Con 2018 participants in San Diego. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33951]

UC Berkeley alumnus Doug Harnsberger was hiking along California’s scenic John Muir Trail a few years ago when he came across a stone hut at the top of 11,955-foot Muir Pass, inside Kings Canyon National Park. Almost as soon as he returned home to Pennsylvania, he started learning as much as he could about the hut. The effort took him to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where he found the original 1930 blueprint for the building by Henry Gutterson, a 1905 graduate of Berkeley who was commissioned to build the hut by the Sierra Club. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33980]

Novelist, critic and cultural historian Marina Werner and Peter Bloom (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) engage Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) from several angles. They discuss the film’s astounding technical craft, Reiniger’s addition of feminist perspectives to the narrative, and the film’s relation to both the Arabian classic 1001 Nights and the French translation/adaptation of that work. Werner and Bloom discuss Reiniger’s relationship to the source material and provide rich historical details about early-twentieth century relations between Europe and what was then called “the Orient.” Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33756]

Novelist Sinaan Antoon and journalist Leila Fadel join UCSB’s Mona Damluji for a post-screening discussion of Kasim Abid’s 2008 film Life After the Fall. They discuss the difficulties of living and working in U.S.-occupied Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the decline of security and safety, loyalties-of-necessity to one’s particular neighborhood in the power vacuum that ensued, and the complications and sometimes harrowing difficulties of everyday life. At issue in particular is each guest’s struggle to tell stories about Iraq that felt honest, empathetic, and adequate when most narrativization of Iraq at the time tended to feel too superficial (U.S. media coverage), too insular (stories from inside the Green Zone), too nostalgic (for a functional Iraq, if one under dictatorship), or too limited in scale (to the scope of whatever groups, such as families or friends, that were intimate enough to permit trust).

Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 33760]