Eugene Lunn served as a professor of history at UC Davis for two decades before his untimely passing in 1990, but his work as a scholar and his deep commitment to his students left a powerful impression that continues to resonate today.

To provoke outrage is the point of rage bait. Research in communication is starting to explain how rage bait hacks the way our brains decide what we choose to read, watch and even click and swipe online. What’s more, the worse we feel, the more we seem to prefer it.

The booming growth of AI chatbots is similar to the trajectory of how social media radically changed our everyday lives, except with supercharged adoption rates and expectations. Some key lessons we are still learning from social media’s rise offer insight on how to avoid the same mistakes with AI.

The American Dream as both idea and ideal, for all its complications, has had an undeniably powerful role in shaping values and aspirations in the U.S. and far beyond its borders. We spoke with faculty and students in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis who represent a wealth of knowledge and perspectives that help us think about American society’s past, present and continuing potential. 

Migration is a powerful force for shaping society. It is also a flashpoint for anger and prejudice in every country and context, and these responses can blur the reasons why people relocate their lives and what their arrival means for the places where they settle. The UC Davis Global Migration Center weaves facts and human experience into the complexity of how we think about migration, both in the U.S. and globally.