This class will be a chronological retrospective of music from the Baroque era, covering the years 1600-1750. All major composers of instrumental and vocal music will be discussed including Monteverdi, Corelli, Vivaldi, Couperin, Handel, Telemann, Rameau, and Bach. From the birth of opera through the major works of J.S. Bach, we will analyze the styles of the three main musical centers of composition: Italy, France, and Germany.

Learn how to expertly capture images, edit, and create extraordinary photographs using solely your iPhone. Gain inspiration to find your creative vision and expand your technical knowledge. By the end of this workshop, you will understand the ins and outs of iPhone photography.

This class will cover the historically significant country-rock movement which started in LA in 1965 and spread across the country, changing the musical landscape of popular music. We will explore how two roots-oriented genres — country music and rock and roll — borrowed from each other and merged to create a new genre which has since spawned many sub-genres, each with its own unique approach to country-rock.

Most Californians are unaware that their state sponsored and funded a campaign to exterminate the Indigenous population — a mass atrocity known under contemporary international law as genocide. This course explores what happened in California between 1846 and 1900 and looks at how a democracy orchestrated a crime typically associated with dictatorship. It also connects California’s story with the larger United States narrative of conquest, and considers the effects upon California society, culture, and politics today.

The threat of nuclear war has returned, both because of Russian actions on INF and US actions with Iran and North Korea. We will examine possible global futures by studying the practice of Nuclear Arms Control, its history, organization, and uses. No prior political or scientific knowledge is required.

Russian culture at the turn of the 20th century was in a dynamic period of experimentation and outstanding discoveries in the visual, literary, and performing arts. The Silver Age produced a galaxy of brilliant artistic talents: explore the poetry of Blok and Akhmatova; the music of Stravinsky and Scriabin; the paintings of Bakst and Malevich; Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes” enterprise. We will also discuss how the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 impacted the arts and the lives of writers, musicians, and artists.

Nonfiction films are more essential than ever, but the subject matter typically overshadows the process for making them. In fact, the filmmaker’s narrative, thematic, and aesthetic choices are as important as the material itself. Each session will feature a recent or in-progress film followed by a candid discussion with the director. We’ll focus on the practical and ethical challenges of making documentaries, from conception through production and postproduction to distribution.

Using selected films, we’ll explore cultural realities, clashes and misunderstandings through the eyes of Chinese, Japanese, Iranian, Sudanese and Latino Immigrants. Background readings and intercultural tools will be offered to facilitate understanding of cultures to be featured, and where possible, film makers and cultural informants will be invited as resources. We’ll conclude by highlighting attitudes about the elderly across cultures and break some stereotypes with Lives Well Lived, a film featuring inspirational stories about seniors in the United States.

In this discussion-centered class we’ll delve into stirring creations from our rich roster of living Bay Area story writers, both known and lesser known: Joyce Carol Oates, Tommy Orange, Tobias Wolff, Molly Giles, Amy Tan, Namwali Serpell, Olga Zilberbourg, Kim Addonizio, Kara Vernor, Peter Orner, Ethel Rohan, Adam Johnson.

Your unique family, heritage, culture, and traditions offer a rich source of material. Learn how to draw on your own background to generate stories that are deeply meaningful to you, the people you love, and even to complete strangers. Writing assignments will include nonfiction and fiction. Sharing work will be encouraged but not required. Leave class with a roadmap for expanding your material.

This course can be viewed each week via ZOOM. The links to the video will post in Course Materials on Fridays at 5:00pm and will remain available until 03/13/2020.   Economics plays a central role in the functioning of every aspect of society, and is expressed through the actions of governments at all levels. This course will address a set of prominent policy issues in which economics is at the core, their origins as policy matters, underlying data and evidence, and policy levers. The focus will be on what the economics profession collectively understands to be true about the issue, not specific policy solutions.

This course emphasizes China’s national history as a part of the global process from the 19th century to the present. Particular attention will be paid to China’s links to transnational migration, trade, and investment throughout the history of Western colonization, the Pacific War and the Cold War, and socialism and post-socialism. China has experienced complex metamorphoses in both its internal economy and governance, as well as with its relations within the region and the world.

Toni Morrison was one of our greatest novelists. Her treatments of race, gender, and above all, humanity and love in America, were matched only by her ability to craft a sentence stunning enough to knock you to the ground. This course will focus on a small selection of Morrison’s most important novels, as well as some of her critical writings.

Prepare your body, brain, and voice to sing with ease, expressiveness, and projection. Learn four traditional rounds and five part-songs by ear, plus choral skills such as legato, staccato, fermata, ritard, timbre, and head and chest voice. More experienced participants may sing in trios or anchor their sections. We will perform for invited guests during the last class. Open to all levels.

This course will study the protest movements of the sixties: civil rights, black power, student, counter-culture, and anti-war, as well as the beginnings of the women’s and the ecology movements. We will explore the successes and failures of these efforts and discuss their long and short-term impact on the direction of American society. We will also consider the challenges of "doing history" as an intellectual discipline.

Learn how to expertly capture images, edit, and create extraordinary photographs using solely your iPhone. Gain inspiration to find your creative vision and expand your technical knowledge. By the end of this workshop, you will understand the ins and outs of iPhone photography.

This course, designed around group discussion, focuses on six US-born short-story writers who are widely published, yet not necessarily “household names.” Each class will center on a specific author. Participants will be asked to analyze stories in terms of theme, meaning, point of view, and other considerations, following a list of study questions available seven to 10 days in advance. Authors may include Stuart Dybeck, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders.

This course describes the activities of nerve cells and how their functioning is altered by drugs or disease. We will discuss the organization of neuronal networks in the brain that serve major mechanisms, such as sleep, epilepsy, and consciousness. Each lecture will begin with an introduction to a basic neuroscience topic, and be followed by a discussion of related clinical concepts. The goal of the course is to enable students to better understand the functions of their own brains. There is no prerequisite for the course.

**NOTE** 10/23 and 10/30 class meetings will be from 10am - 1pm

Silicon Valley occupies a special place in the global imagination. It is the epicenter of unbridled entrepreneurship and the object of fables of infinite wealth. This class will consider how financial and human resources are mobilized in Silicon Valley, and how the legal framework of intellectual property rights and the stock market impinge on its urban form and individual buildings.

**NOTE** Final class meeting on 11/06

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants and fungi – relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these organisms as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these relationships. Ranging over coffee, chocolate, tobacco, cannabis, opium, wine, absinthe, psychedelic mushrooms, and psychiatric medications, we will explore the history and current science related to how psychoactive substances impact the mind and body.

This course presents the operas in the fall 2019 season of the San Francisco Opera company, plus a preview of two that will be featured in the summer 2020 season. We will contextualize the composition and creation of the works, discuss the issues they present, and analyze how the combination of music and text delivers content. The course is appropriate and informative (and, hopefully, fun) for people actually attending the opera as well as for any curious learner

So many things change in the world of international politics from one year to the next. This course will look at areas of instability and concern that have emerged or re-emerged in the past year. Each week, we will examine a different case study in depth, examining the causes and impacts of crises in countries including Sri Lanka, Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, South Africa, and the Philippines.

From the Sierra Nevada to the Himalayas, mountains have an extraordinary power to evoke wonder, awe, and a sense of the sacred. Drawing on research for his award-winning book Sacred Mountains of the World and his work with national parks and world heritage sites. Edwin Bernbaum will explore the importance and symbolism of mountains in the mythologies, religions, history, literature, and art in cultures around the world. The course focuses on the key role that mountains play in inspiring environmental conservation and spiritual growth.

**NOTE** Final class meeting on 11/07

Learn how great dancers and choreographers transform the arts and our view of the world. In this class, we will consider dancers such as Rudolf Nureyev; Broadway and film legends such as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Agnes DeMille; and choreographers such as Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp. We will also consider leading dance artists of today, including Antonio Gades, Robert Battle, Michelle Dorrance, Cathy Marston, Suzanne Farrell, Wendy Whelan, and Misty Copeland.

This course can be viewed each week via ZOOM. The links to the video will post in Course Materials on Fridays at 5:00pm and will remain available until 12/31/2019. As Americans, we normally view the upheaval of 1776 through the eyes of our national heroes—Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, etc. But we must never forget that the Revolution was a critical milestone in British history as well. What did our countrymen across the Atlantic make of the wild and tumultuous events transpiring in the colonies? What were the effects of the decision to quash our independence?