Culture
Twenty-five years later, they returned to the site where the earthquake wreaked the most havoc, to remember a day they could never quite forget.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hosted the “8 Big Ideas” event last Wednesday, as part of its “Science at the Theater” initiative. During the event, eight scientists were invited to present game-changing concepts and progressive ideas in eight minutes each.
Abantey, the role-playing world Becky Thomas has developed over the course of 25 years, was never meant to be just a game—it was always meant to be a learning and team-building exercise through which young students could apply the ideas they learned in school.
Members of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders took some time to befriend and pass on gifts to female cancer patients as part of October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
17-year-old Sophie Elkin, named Oakland’s 3rd Youth Poet Laureate in August, writes about what she knows: the grit and grandeur of Oakland’s people and places and the less tangible but no less real world of adolescence. After a childhood struggling to come out to herself and her parents, Sophie hopes her poetry will help other women to find their voices the way she has.
Church members and neighbors gathered at Skyline Community Church to honor their pets with an annual and unusual gift: a blessing.
Some historians estimate that as many as one third of cowboys in the old West were black, but black cowboys are largely absent in mainstream pop culture. As the Oakland Black Cowboys Association celebrates 40 years, its members reflect on what being a black cowboy means to them and their families.
When several art forms, disciplines and cultural backgrounds blend, there comes reflection, innovation and imagination. James Gayles, an Oakland-based Emmy Award-winning artist and musician, is striving to draw out the aesthetic value hidden in the intersection between painting and literature through a collaborative book he’s titled Reflection. He juxtaposes his own watercolor paintings of iconic cultural and historic figures, such as Nelson Mandela, Miles Davis, Celia Cruz, Nina Simone and James Baldwin, with poems written by people he knows personally….
After a summer of bombing and fighting between Israel and Gaza, Jewish leaders in Oakland are grappling with how to address the violence and ongoing Middle East tension within more traditional thoughts about the fall’s Jewish High Holidays, which focus on starting new and letting go of the past.