Author Archives: Menaka Fernando

During her internship in northern California this past summer, fifth-year political science student Karen Salazar asked a group of kids in her East Bay Area hometown to draw their neighborhood. More than half the kids drew a large oil refinery in the background as if it was a part of the scenery, like a tree, […]

For about 25 U.S. college students studying in Shanghai, China, last summer, the term interdisciplinary study took on a whole new meaning. To study globalization in China’s booming economy, UCLA anthropology Professor Yunxiang Yan took students on a five-week travel study program in which they researched various topics ““ from the Starbucks phenomenon to workers’ […]

While participating in a sacramental ceremony in the Amazon basin of South America during the late 1980s, Dr. Charles Grob had a moment of realization about the power of psychedelic substances used for therapeutic purposes. Grob, the director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, was at the time […]

Twelve days after Sept. 11, 2001, spoken word artist Shannon Staloch converted to Islam, and has been melding her spirituality with her art ever since. Staloch, who will be performing at UCLA tonight at the Cooperage to conclude Islamic Awareness Week, believes her art and that of a growing number of Islamic artists across the […]

A campaign to establish a legislative branch in the undergraduate student government is scheduled to launch next week and could become the defining issue of the council’s elections in the spring. The effort to bring a senate system to the Undergraduate Students Association Council as soon as next year is being pushed by leaders of […]

During a summer day in 1995, 47-year-old Norma McCorvey was baptized as a Christian in a Dallas swimming pool. Since her conversion, McCorvey has been actively advocating a repeal of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion ““ the case that she brought to the courts. McCorvey filed the suit […]

When Ben Parr landed in LAX after a one-way flight from Tasmania in mid-December, he had nothing but a backpack full of a few essentials and the phone number to one contact in the United States ““ the Big Blue Bus. Parr is the first international student from the island state, southeast of mainland Australia, […]