Justine Marie Sherry

Berkeley couple Kris Perry and Sandy Stier were married today, Friday June 28, at San Francisco City Hall. Attorney General Kamala Harris officiated. Photo: KTVU

Prop. 8 plaintiffs and Berkeley couple Kris Perry and Sandy Stier were married this afternoon by Attorney General Kamala Harris at San Francisco City Hall. The wedding took place at around 4:30 pm, shortly after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a stay on the 2010 lower-court ruling that would clear the way for same-sex marriages, to begin immediately throughout California.

Perry and Stier were at the head of the line that formed at San Francisco City Hall to obtain marriage licenses and Harris rushed to City Hall to perform the first marriage. According to media, including KQED News and the Los Angeles Times, the couple were the first same-sex marriage in California since 2008.

At the event, Harris said: “Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, I now declare you spouses for life.” Once they were married, Perry exclaimed: “It was worth the wait!”(...)

Read the rest of Berkeley Prop. 8 couple first to marry after stay lifted (281 words)

By Tracey Taylor. | Permalink | 6 comments |
Post tags: Prop 8, Same sex marriage

"We’re coming up on a year of marriage."
"Tell me your favorite thing about each other."

"Her ability to intuit my moods."
"Her living room choreography of every song that comes on the radio."

Chefs at work in the Chez Panisse kitchen. Photo: Amanda Marsalis

On Monday this week, Chez Panisse re-opened to the public after an early-morning fire in March shut the landmark restaurant down for nearly four months. On that day, we published an interview with owner Alice Waters who spoke about the process of rebuilding, and how her team turned a crisis into an opportunity to do a little re-inventing. Waters also said she had thought of moving the restaurant to a totally different location on more than one occasion.

Much to the relief of many Berkeleyans, Chez Panisse has stayed put. Today we bring you photographs of the results of all the careful restoration and rebuilding work that has gone into bringing the restaurant back to life.(...)

Read the rest of It’s back! Inside the newly re-opened Chez Panisse (221 words)

By Tracey Taylor. | Permalink | 15 comments |
Post tags: Alice Waters, Chez Panisse

The angel had the tentative, embarrassed expression that most virtuous people adopt upon entering the Senior Combination Room.

Know where this is? Take a guess and let us know in the Comments.

Photo: Neil Mishalov.

By Berkeleyside Editors. | Permalink | 6 comments |
Post tags: Where in Berkeley?

It's been four years since the recovery began, but for millions of people it never did. Jobs are still hard to come by, and policymakers have mostly given up trying to make them less so. But even worse than this malign neglect is House Republicans' plan to cut food stamps amidst our quiet depression.

It's cruel and unusual policy.

But at least it's cruel and unusual policy that won't happen. The farm bill failed in the House last week after conservative Republicans revolted over what they thought were too-small cuts, and liberal Democrats did over what they thought were too-big cuts to food stamps. As Josh Barro of Business Insider points out, food stamps will continue at their pre-stimulus levels as long as this deadlock continues. And that could be quite awhile. After all, the battle over food stamps isn't just a battle over budgets; it's another battle in our not-so-cold war over ideology. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page makes clear, conservatives think the welfare state is so generous that far too many people aren't, as they put it, "buying food, which is one of life's most basic responsibilities." In other words, they think the safety net has become a hammock stocked with snacks on the road to serfdom.

It's a question of incentives. House Republicans seem to think people on food stamps must just be lazy -- or worse. One Republican amendment to the farm bill would have allowed states to drug test food stamp recipients, and kick any positive test-takers off the rolls. It's the same idea Florida governor Rick Scott tried with welfare benefits -- and which cost the state money. Indeed, the Florida program didn't reduce the number of welfare applicants, but it did reduce the state's bottom line, because the cost of administering the drug tests outweighed the savings from the 2.5 percent of applicants who failed it. Fiscal conservatism!

Now, to be fair, House Republicans do have a plan to save money by kicking millions of non-drug users off of food stamps: they want to kick the unemployed off too. As it already is, food stamps, like welfare, have a work requirement. Beneficiaries have to look for a job, accept any job they can find, get in job training if they can't find one, and can't quit a job. But as Robert Greenstein of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, House Republicans wanted to add a "work requirement" amendment that would let states to cut off food stamp benefits to anyone without a job or in job training without providing any funding for jobs or job training. In other words, if you're unemployed, you're out of luck -- and out of food stamps.

There are lots of words that come to mind here, but sociopathic might be the first one. As my colleague Jordan Weissmann points out, food stamp use has gone up because poverty has gone up. And poverty has gone up because there still aren't enough jobs. Now, the labor market has recovered a good deal since the dark days of Lehmangeddon, but, as you can see below, there are still three unemployed people for every job opening. That's worse than it was after the tech bubble burst.

House Republicans are ideologically incapable of imagining a world where people can't find a job because there aren't enough of them. In other words, they won't let themselves understand the world we live in. They think food stamp use is at record-highs, because people are drug addicts or just shiftless -- not because the recovery has been so weak. This insistence that our problems are all supply, and no demand, is why Republicans have opposed any and all attempts to stimulate the economy, either monetary or fiscal. It's bad economics, and worse morality.

At least Marie Antoinette wanted to let them eat cake.

Thanks to STEM-ma Luise-Charlotte Kappe, who pointed out:

Just for the record: The first female Ph.D. recipient in Germany was Dorothea Schlözer (1770-1825), who recieved her Ph.D. in Philosophy in Goettingen in 1787! Others we are familiar with received their Ph.D. in mathematics much later, e.g. Sonya Kovalevki in 1874 also in Goettingen, and Emmy Noether in 1907 in Erlangen.

You can read about her here.  Apparently she was one of a group of five daughters of academics who studied at the university.  As the story goes, her father made a bet with another professor that his teaching methods were superior.  They agreed to test their methods on their first-born children (are the statisticians cringing?), both of whom were female.  Not sure who won … probably the students, who received terrific and broad educations.

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Andrew Hoffman and John Paluksa (l to r), seen here with Comal Executive Chef Matt Gandin, are hoping to open a new restaurant in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood. Photo: Postcard PR

The owners of Comal in downtown Berkeley are hoping to open a second restaurant in Berkeley, this time in the Elmwood neighborhood.

John Paluska and Andrew Hoffman have their sights on the 3,400-square-foot vacant space in the old Wright’s Garage building at 2635 Ashby Ave. (The renovated retail space is to the left of Dream Fluff Donuts).

The plan is to serve Northern Californian cuisine, and the restaurant will offer craft cocktails, a full bar, and be open for lunch and dinner, said Paluska. The atmosphere, energy and design will likely not be far-removed from Comal. “The space has some of the raw attributes we liked at Comal,” he said.

However, Paluska stressed that the project is in the very early stages of development.(...)

Read the rest of Comal owners plan to open new Berkeley restaurant (598 words)

By Tracey Taylor. | Permalink | 9 comments |
Post tags: Andrew Hoffman, Comal, John Paluska, The Elmwood

Virtually overlooked Tuesday in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's vital decision to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act case was a gut-wrenching ruling from the justices that ultimately could separate a father from his daughter. In the case styled Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, the Court ruled that a Native American man named Dusten Brown could not rely upon the language of a federal statute, the Indian Child Welfare Act, to protect himself against the termination of his parental rights over his daughter, Veronica, after another couple sought to adopt her.

Here is the link to the ruling (and here is the link to The Atlantic's prior coverage of the case). The justice remanded the case back down to the South Carolina Supreme Court to review the facts of the case under the new standard the Court has applied-- a standard that limits Brown's parental rights. Indian advocates Tuesday suggested that this result doesn't necessarily mean that Brown will have to give back his daughter but I'm not so sure. The justices have just given license to that state supreme court to aid a popular hometown couple in a dispute with a Native American who lives far away.

The back story, to say the least, is complicated but you can identify the contours of the ruling, and at the same time understand what happened to this little girl, simply by reading the many descriptions of the case offered by the various justices as they sorted through the debris. For example, to start, there is Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision. He barely concealed his contempt for Brown and his cause by framing the story this way:

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee. Because Baby Girl is classified in this way, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 required her to be taken, at the age of 27 months, from the only parents she had ever known and handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his parental rights and who had no prior contact with the child. The provisions of the federal statute at issue here do not demand this result.

To Justice Thomas, who concurred in the result, the majority was, if anything, too supportive of the federal law regardless of the scope of the rights it conferred upon Brown. Applying the facts of this sad case to the Child Welfare Act would be unconstitutional, Justice Thomas wrote, because:

Nothing in the Indian Commerce Clause permits Congress to enact special laws applicable to Birth Father merely because of his status as an Indian. Because adoption proceedings like this one involve neither "commerce" nor "Indian tribes," there is simply no constitutional basis for Congress' assertion of authority over such proceedings. Also, the notion that Congress can direct state courts to apply different rules of evidence and procedure merely because a person of Indian descent is involved raises absurd possibilities.

Then came Justice Stephen Breyer. He, too, concurred in the result. But he wanted his colleagues and the rest of the world to know that he thinks more of the Child Welfare Act than does Justice Thomas. He also evidently wanted everyone to know how little he thought of the way in which Brown initially handled his legal and moral obligations to his daughter. Justice Breyer wrote:

[W]e should decide here no more than is necessary. Thus, this case does not involve a father with visitation rights or a father who has paid "all of his child support obligations." Neither does it involve special circumstances such as a father who was deceived about the existence of the child or a father who was prevented from supporting his child.

Then came long that old softie, Justice Antonin Scalia. He dissented from the majority opinion and had a special message about parenting that he wanted to share with the world, a passage that reads straight out of a Dr. Phil script. Justice Scalia wrote:

The Court's opinion, it seems to me, needlessly demeans the rights of parenthood. It has been the constant practice of the common law to respect the entitlement of those who bring a child into the world to raise that child. We do not inquire whether leaving a child with his parents is "in the best interest of the child." It sometimes is not; he would be better off raised by someone else. But parents have their rights, no less than children do. This father wants to raise his daughter, and the statute amply protects his right to do so. There is no reason in law or policy to dilute that protection.

And, finally, came Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She wrote about the ways in which the federal statute was designed to try to help troubled Native American families, like Brown's family:

Moreover, the majority's focus on "intact" families begs the question of what Congress set out to ac­complish with ICWA. In an ideal world, perhaps all parents would be perfect. They would live up to their parental responsibilities by providing the fullest possible financial and emotional support to their children.

They would never suffer mental health problems, lose their jobs, struggle with substance dependency, or encounter any of the other multitudinous personal crises that can make it difficult to meet these responsibilities. In an ideal world parents would never become estranged and leave their children caught in the middle.

But we do not live in such a world. Even happy families do not always fit the custodial-parent mold for which the majority would reserve IWCA's substantive protections; unhappy families all too often do not. They are families nonetheless. Congress understood as much.

In the end, we have a decision here that says, contrary to both the text and the spirit of the law, that the Native American father of this little girl cannot rely upon a federal law designed to aid the parents of Native American children because he did not initially have custody of the child. The ruling makes mention of Browns' failure to initially support his child but makes little mention of the ways in which the mother of the little girl sought to hide the adoption from him. This was always a case of Solomon-like ramifications--with a group of judges literally having to choose where a baby should live. For such a weighty decision it's a terribly airy ruling.

An anonymous professor has started a tumblr humorously characterizing life as a college professor… with gifs!  Here are some of my favorites but, if you’re a professor or want to know what it’s like to be one, and you can handle a bit of snark, you should definitely go on over!

Arriving Late to My Friend’s Panel

When Academics Attend Conference Presentations

When Tenure Track Faculty Hear About a Course Release

Revise and Resubmit

Fourteenth Week of the Semester

At the Department Party, When My Chair “Asked” Me to Join the Assessment Committee

When Someone Says, “You only teach two classes? What do you do all day?”

Thanks to Ben C. for the tip!

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Today in epic African formalwear. 

Thanks to Jill Tietjen, regular contributor to Grandma got STEM, co-author of the Bestseller Her Story, A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, and President and CEO of Technically Speaking, Inc. for this post.

The first woman inducted into the Poultry Historical Society’s Hall of Fame, we should be thankful to Mary Engle Pennington for the fact that our eggs, milk, poultry and fish, are safely handled and safe for us to eat.  In fact, I tell my audiences that when they eat their Thanksgiving turkey, they should say a silent thank you to Mary Engle Pennington.  Today’s supermarket refrigerated and frozen food sections are the direct result of her work.  She was a trailblazer in the implementation of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act which was passed to secure the food supply, overseeing the handling, transportation and storage of perishables.

Pennington was a bacteriological chemist who revolutionized methods of storing and transporting perishable foods.  Although she did not receive the B.S. degree that she had earned in 1895 from the University of Pennsylvania, she rose to become head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food research lab.  She determined how best to freeze fruits and vegetables, how to keep milk products from spoiling, and how to slaughter poultry to keep them fresher longer.  Her six patents are testament to her significant influence.

Her interest in her eventual career came from a library book on chemistry which she read when she was twelve.  Denied her B.S. because of her gender (she was awarded a certificate of proficiency instead), she earned her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania at age 22 in chemistry with minors in zoology and botany.  This degree was conferred under an old statute that made exceptions for female students in “extraordinary circumstances.”

After Pennington took and passed the civil service exam in 1906 under the name of M.E. Pennington, she was hired as a bacteriological chemist by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who thought she was a man.  She wrote books, articles, pamphlets, and several government bulletins.  She was called the “Ice Lady” for her design of refrigerators for the home and refrigerated railroad cars for railroads and for encouraging vendors to keep their wares on ice.  She invented the egg carton to keep eggs from breaking during shipment.

It was a pleasure to meet her family members when she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.  The illustrator for many of her books was a relative with the last name of Betts.

He wanted to hold her hand so badly.

Brighton Swimming Club, 1863 (via The Retronaut)

Check out those….stovepipes!

mannyk:

Kim Phuc, pictured above,  was running from an airborne attack, horribly burned with napalm, in June of 1972, 40 years ago. She ran blindly, in unbelievable pain, right at the lens of Associated Press photog Nick Ut. I don’t know what his shutter speed was. 1/125th? 1/250th? The blink of an eye. The click of a shutter. And this young girl ran into the pages of history.

Kim has found peace, and a message she can offer, borne of her suffering. She runs The Kim Foundation International, which promotes reconciliation, and she acts as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO. She has transformed from “the girl in the picture,” or, “the napalm girl,” into a viable, visible symbol of peace and hope. Her’s is an important story of resilience, courage, and forgiveness.

Today in microfashion.

What I need in a coffee shop in Cambridge is pretty much what I need from a pub. Strong drink, free Wi-Fi, and a table a long way from the door and handy for the fire exit.

Company Hierarchy

Found as part of The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” — the best thing you will ever read about the office or The Office.

This morning, Starbucks announced that starting next Tuesday it will post the calorie content of all its coffee drinks and food items in all its company-owned stores in the U.S.

This is big news, and overdue. For many people who don't want to think about calories, or think they have a good idea of the calories in what they're eating, Starbucks is the first place they experience sticker shock -- the 460-calorie blueberry scone that's a quarter of the 2000 calories many women aim to eat every day, the seemingly healthful slice of banana-walnut bread that's 490 calories. But then you can look for and find lower-calorie items on the menu that's labeled (at Starbucks, for instance, bagels under 300 calories), and start to acquire a sense of the calorie count of what you're regularly ordering out  and eating at home -- the real utility of calorie labeling.

Blueberry scone (Starbucks)

The FDA was supposed to release national rules for the national labeling required of all restaurants with at least 20 locations -- one of the best, if least-noticed, parts of the Affordable Care Act. Years later, food-industry skirmishes and rumored cold feet by the White House Office of Management and Budget are still holding up those rules, as Marion Nestle recently documented. My home state of Massachusetts passed a statewide calorie-labeling law in 2009; it never got implemented, so restaurants would not need to retool menus once the ACA rules went into national effect. That's four years of lost opportunity to modify eating behavior. And even after the rules come out, which the FDA says now will be by the end of this year, there'll be at least another year to wait for them to be implemented.

In the meantime, initial studies of the effects of menu labeling on behavior and weight reduction produced mixed results, to the delight of the food industry. But, as I wrote here, there will always be plenty of people who decide they don't want the food police telling them what to do, they want to splurge, they'll order more calories for better bang for the buck. That's all fine.

The point of public health is not to dictate personal behavior, however many times the soda industry dresses Mayor Bloomberg as a nanny. The point is to make the default food environment more healthful, and mandatory calorie labeling has an important curbing effect on businesses that don't want to look like they're only offering high-calorie, unhealthy offerings. Starbucks itself made its own default milk choice 2 percent rather than whole, to get ahead of the sticker shock it knew would come once calorie labeling became the rule in New York City.

One of the less discouraging early studies on consumer behavior, conducted by Stanford researchers at Starbucks stores in New York City, which had calorie labeling, and Boston and Philadelphia, which didn't yet, showed that people did consciously order lower-calorie items after the information was in their faces every time they made a purchase. Starbucks didn't take the news as encouragement, though; when I wrote about that and other more-encouraging studies, a spokeswoman implied that the company would wait until national standards were in place before implementing labeling anyplace it didn't have to.

Starbucks isn't the first big player to claim good corporate citizenship by not waiting for the FDA. McDonalds itself announced last year that it would post counts on its menu boards. Panera and Au Bon Pain make calorie counts easy to find in all their stores.

But it's significant. Particularly for the baked-goods-obsessed, like me. Much more important  (okay, as important), to my mind, is the fact that the sawdust-seeming baked goods at Starbucks -- even if in 2009 the company laudably eliminated artificial flavorings, ingredients, high-fructose corn syrup, and trans fats -- are about to improve. Radically.

Last year, Starbucks paid $100 million to buy La Boulange, one of my favorite bakeries, in San Francisco, with the idea of using its skill at scaling up production throughout the Bay Area to produce similar-quality baked goods on a comparatively massive scale. I got to document and taste the Starbucks future when writing a long recent piece on the rollout, which has already begun in hundreds of California stores and will reach thousands of stores by the end of this year. Most of the the new La Boulange baked goods, each and every one of which will be served warm, are vastly better than what Starbucks sells now--and many of them are lower-calorie, too. I suspect that's part of what's behind this morning's Starbucks announcement.

Even better, for the people who value national health over quality baked goods, is that the news on menu labeling has recently gotten better than it ever has been -- as many observers predicted would be the case as the data started coming in from longer-term studies than the initial ones that delighted nay-sayers. A just-published large-scale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation review of four years of calorie labeling and the studies done to date shows widespread consumer support for national calorie labeling. Though results on behavior and weight are still mixed, the report finds encouraging changes in certain populations, such as women and people who are overweight; a reduction in the almost universal underestimation of calorie content in fast-food items; possible reduction of overall daily calories people consume once they are exposed to menu labeling in even one restaurant; and -- perhaps most encouragingly for the industry that fought and now mostly supports calorie labeling -- no reductions in revenue from voluntary labeling.

Even the National Restaurant Association, its president, Dawn Sweeney, said last week in response to a question at a Share Our Strength conference on reducing hunger and teaching people to cook, is eager for the FDA to release its standards -- standards it initially opposed, vehemently. There are battles still to be fought: so far movie theaters, grocery stores that sell prepared foods, and bars have wriggled out of labeling requirements.

But everyone's getting impatient. Canny chains are turning the delay to their public-relations advantage. Today's announcement by Starbucks is one more message to the FDA: implement national calorie labeling already.

Students are used to thinking of college as a requirement, or a career accelerator, or four-year party. But maybe it's best to think of it as a straightforward investment.

Before making an investment in a stock or a house, you would do research. You would consider the costs weighed against future returns. You would know there are no guarantees. It should be the same with college. Like buying a house, the most important question isn't the total price, but whether you can afford to pay it off in the long run.

For most students, the college investment "appears to pay off," according to Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic in a wonderful new study of studies on the benefits of higher education. Their lit review covers a lot of ground, from the growth of student debt to the most lucrative majors. Here are some of their major findings, gleaned from reams of research from the past 40 years, organized in an easy click-print-and-paste FAQ chart for young people thinking about more school -- and older people debating whether college is still worth it.