The new issue of the New Yorker is out, and while you can’t yet read all the Talk of the Towns online, the print edition regales readers with a small piece about Calum Wright, a UC Berkeley student who organized a counter-protest against one Michael “Fresh” Schuck, who spent seventeen days in a tree. Said tree-sitter planted his buttocks atop some campus branches in solidarity with the tree-sitters who are still trying to stop the demolition of an oak grove near Memorial Stadium, but also to protest the BP deal, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, yadda yadda yadda. Said counter-protester rallied his friends to protest Schuck for being a dirty hippie. The item has its quotient of Berkeley cliches, but every story geared toward a national audience has to have a few, and the piece hews to the New Yorker’s tradition of letting the characters display their absurdity and humanity without the writer’s interference. As the item’s coda says, Go Bears.
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