Vikram Chandra's best-selling Sacred Games was published in 2007. His previous works include Love and Longing in Bombay and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He is the winner of the Crossword Prize for English Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the David Higham Prize, and the Paris Review Discovery prize. He currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California. For more information see the Story Hour website: http://storyhour.berkeley.edu/

The Presence of the Past: Legal Dimensions of Armenian-Turkish Relations This symposium explores three contentious issues which are preventing Armenian-Turkish rapprochement. Speakers: Stephan Astourian, The University of Claifornia, Berkeley; Alfred de Zayas, Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations; Susan Karamanian, The George Washington University Law School; Catherine Kessedjian, University Pantheon-Assas, Paris II; Raymond Kevorkian, Institut français de géopolitique, Université Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis; Serge Sur, University Pantheon-Assas, Paris II Sponsors: Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Institute of (ISEEES), The Armenian Studies Program, the Western Armenian National Congress http://iseees.berkeley.edu/

This lecture is devoted to the first attempt at constructing a style-history of this important subject category in Chinese painting, from its beginnings in the Tang dynasty into the Southern Song. Bird-and-flower paintings that are loosely datable are looked at in close detail, so that the new modes of depiction in successive periods can be traced. The lecture ends with a close look at a handscroll by the late Northern Song master Liang Shimin.

Dr. JOE WIEMELS of UCSF explains the importance of epigenetics. Epigenetic changes do not damage DNA (like mutations), but alter when DNA is expressed. This can affect development in early life. Epigenetic changes may be a cause some types of leukemia. Leukemia includes a number of different diseases with different patterns of epigenetic markers including methylation. Environmental agents may change methylation patterns, and the changes may be heritable. This was part of a symposium organized by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment of Cal/EPA http://oehha.ca.gov/index.html, the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit at UCSF http://coeh.berkeley.edu/ucpehsu, and the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at the University of California Berkeley http://circle.berkeley.edu. Research funding is from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and US EPA. Views expressed are not those of these agencies.