Crosscurrents

Sugar is a great temptation, UCSF scientists say--it's even addictive, in addition to its links to chronic heart disease and diabetes. According to a report released this week, we consume three times more sugar than we did thirty years ago. Scientists say it's time for a drastic intervention...

Yesterday, we heard how politics have shaped California’s prison system, and about the push and pull between rehabilitation and punishment. “At the end of the day, corrections was about the bumping of heads of those people that think prison should be for punishment and those people that think that prison should be for rehabilitation,” says JB Wells, who spent almost three decades stuck between the two ideologies.

What does the phrase “emotional science” mean to you? For some, it implies psychology. For Greg Niemeyer, a tenured associate professor in UC Berkeley’s department in New Media, “emotional science” means science that stimulates and engages. Niemeyer is also the director of the Data and Democracy Initiative at CITRIS, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, which looks to utilize technology and science to help individuals makes democratic and conscious decisions about the world around them.

Thirty-three years ago, the assassinations of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone sent shock waves throughout the city and devastated the two men's families. Jonathan Moscone, Mayor Moscone’s son, was 14-years-old at that time.

A look inside California’s toughest prison; the politics of parole; a civil rights lawyer is fighting UC Berkeley police over gay rights; and the memory of George Moscone is adapted on the stage.