After four years of living near Santa Cruz, last weekend I finally ventured to the annual Fungus Fair for the first time. With elements of nature, science, and hippie culture, it’s an event that sounded just so… Santa Cruz. My expectations were tempered after hearing Meghan’s first radio story for KUSP, which shadowed volunteers searching…
David Cohn doesn’t look like the new face of journalism. He’s boyish, with an untamed mop of black curls and a stubbly beard: Picture a darker Mark Zuckerberg, but more stylishly dressed. It’s early in the morning when Cohn comes to talk with our class about Spot.Us, his three-year-old experiment in crowdfunding journalism, but he…
Neuroscience, physics, biology and birds are recurring topics of my conversations with Dennis Taylor, the community conversations editor at The Salinas Californian, where I interned during fall quarter. Every time I speak with Dennis about anything remotely scientific, a look of genuine excitement and interest comes over him. During one of our chats, he told…
As my internship at the Monterey Herald came to a close today, I can’t help feel a little a bad for all of the amputeed pages and pages of research in my longer stories that were on the wrong side of the cut. The latest information to suffer this fate is from a story about Tamara…
I grew up near a fortress built during the French and Indian War and used to love historical reenacting, but I eventually quit. In the eyes of dominant reenacting culture, period-correct portrayal of a frontier woman meant that my male friends would be throwing tomahawks and shooting muzzleloaders, and I’d be mending bodices and cooking…
Did you remember to invite your relatives to Thanksgiving? How about your extremely distant relatives? The folks at the San Francisco Zoo remembered. In fact, they laid out their fine china, cooked a colorful feast, and pulled up chairs for 15 distant relatives—the zoo’s lemurs. In an event called ‘Feast for the Beasts,’ the zoo’s…
I didn’t grow up eating Thanksgiving dinner, but over the years I’ve learned how to do the traditional American turkey-day right. There’s the carving of large birds, the mashing of potatoes, and of course, the skipping of lunch. Most people I know skip lunch on Thanksgiving. We may call it “saving room for dinner,” but…
There’s a room at UC Santa Cruz filled with chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and green tea, bananas and pineapple. But far from ready-to-eat desserts, all are leafy and green, basking in the humid light of one of the three UCSC campus greenhouses. A certain former UCSC student and plant aficionado in my life recently told…
This past weekend I willingly deprived myself of sleep in order to participate in Science Hack Day in San Francisco. What is a Hack Day? Well, a hack is a quick solution to a problem. Not necessarily pretty, but probably clever. A Hack Day is usually a 48 hour event where people with ideas get together and make…
One minute I’m milling around the dock of the Santa Cruz harbor, the next minute I’m hurtling out to sea on a 23-foot motorboat named “Aquaholic,” a chilly Pacific gale plastering hair across my face as I shout out questions about crab fishing and scribbling down the answers in a notepad that threatens to be…
