-

San Jose tech giant PayPal agrees to $30 million settlement with feds over DEI fund
The government’s contention that DEI is by nature discriminatory relies on the concept of “reverse discrimination,” in which dominant groups are seen as victims of racism, said UC Santa Cruz lecturer Nolan Higdon, who studies the technology industry and U.S. culture and politics. Higdon rejects the concept.
-

UCSC researcher aims to fill gaps in Pajaro Valley air monitoring data, help farmworkers deal with pollution health impacts
Javier González-Rocha, an assistant professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, has been working to identify air monitoring data gaps in the Pajaro Valley to better inform farmworkers and the local community.
-

How an H5N1 Outbreak in Elephant Seals Can Inform Pandemic Readiness
Johnson’s collaborator UC Santa Cruz physiological ecologist Roxanne Beltran, who regularly studies the elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park, will also integrate her spatial mapping of the seals to address the same seal-to-seal transmission question from an ecological angle.
-

New York Times logo
A Landslide in Alaska Set Off a Tsunami. There May Be More to Come.
“The bar is, can we do better than missing most of these,” said Noah Finnegan, a geomorphologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study. “So getting a handle on why these precursors happen and what their relationship is to catastrophic collapse is an area many people are interested…
-

7 Books That Use Family Archives to Break Generational Silence
Tamiko Nimura of Electric Literature named Emeritus Literature Professor Karen Tei Yamashita’s book Letters To Memory in its list of acclaimed books that tell untold stories by delving deeply into family archives. “It’s difficult to describe this inventive journey through family history, wartime incarceration and resettlement, but it’s poetic, funny, and deeply intelligent,” writes Nimura.
-

The 18 Best Books of 2026 (So Far) – Esquire
In an Esquire books roundup, reviewer Adam Morgan said that Emeritus Literature Professor Karen Tei Yamashita deserves to be a literary household name and that he “devoured” her ambitious fifth novel, Questions 27 & 28, titled after the “so-called loyalty questionnaire” that 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to take during their internment in concentration camps.



