The Wheeler Column

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Recently the Townsend Humanities Center at U.C. Berkeley has initiated a site devoted to heightening modern awareness of Milton’s relevance and currency by using audiovisual approaches…

Welcome back everyone!!

I’m not on campus today, so I don’t have the pleasure of seeing your beautiful, shining faces or feeding off your I’m So Rested From An Amazing Summer!! energy, but I did want to wish you all a very happy first day of the new semester.

Here’s some Ferris Bueller to help get you good and ready for the new year.

If you’ve ever wondered what your students were listening to on their iPods while they waltzed into class or what albums were the soundtrack to their writing, Professor Eric Falci clues us all in.

In an article for Food and Wine Magazine, our department’s own Karen Leibowitz writes, “We weren’t chefs—I was a graduate student and my husband, Anthony Myint, was a line cook—but we thought it would be fun to sublet a taco cart and sell “PB&Js,” sandwiches stuffed with pork belly and jicama. We set up shop at 21st and Mission in San Francisco and called ourselves Mission Street Food.” Karen answers some of my excited questions about how studying literature helped her first, manage a restaurant, then write a funky cookbook, with her husband.

If you studied English as an undergraduate, someone eventually asked you, “What are you going to do with that?” Candace Cunard ’11 gives her answer.

Even if you didn’t graduate, that doesn’t mean you don’t need some inspiration. Here’s a roundup of some of the best commencement speeches of the season.