Jody Murray

Todo Cambia, UC Merced’s annual Human Rights Film Festival, is about more than film this year.

Deborah Taffa, an Indigenous author and educator whose book about growing up in a mixed-race home and struggling with social acceptance was hailed as one the best memoirs of 2024, will make a special visit to Merced this month.

An exhibition that collects artistic visions from five continents and weaves them into a compelling plea to protect our planet has found the perfect home for the first few months of 2025.

At least that’s how Grace Garnica, manager of UC Merced’s La Galería, sees it. And she has a point: The Central Valley and a university committed to environmental research are ideal for “Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology.”*

Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of “what it’s doing to us” research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students’ academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development?

Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children — kids younger than 6 — whose social norms were upended by day care closures and families sheltered at home.

Cancer is vicious. In 2025, it is expected to cause more than 618,000 U.S. deaths — nearly twice the combined populations of Merced and Modesto. Each year, almost half of this nation, young and old, is touched by the disease through personal diagnosis or an afflicted loved one.

Jeff Yoshimi joined the 50% when his wife, Sandy, learned she had breast cancer. The blighted cells had spread to some lymph nodes.

Katherine Cai is on stage, reminiscing about high school.

“My dad tried to teach me geometry. You know how that goes. The questions get more and more difficult and Dad gets more and more frustrated, which leads to both of us having a crisis.”

“We’re all just victims of word problems.”

Laughs ripple through the 100 or so students, faculty and friends in the audience. They can relate.

Cai, a UC Merced psychology major, is halfway through her standup comedy routine, a final performance for Writing 122. And she’s crushing it.

The significance of soccer in the San Joaquin Valley cannot be overstated. It’s a sport that connects communities, bridges borders and stretches across generations of fathers and mothers and daughters and sons.

So it is fitting that the Valley’s youngest university has already established a strong presence in collegiate soccer at a coast-to-coast level. Both of UC Merced’s intercollegiate soccer teams are making return trips to national championship tournaments after stellar regular seasons.

Tsitsi Dangarembga spread the spirit of ubuntu over UC Merced on Wednesday night, imparting its message of “how we can be good people who live well together.”

Scientists, policymakers and concerned community members will gather at UC Merced this week to compare notes and chart new directions to improve air quality and public health in the San Joaquin Valley.

UC Merced is being recognized from coast to coast as an institution that “redefines academic excellence, Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said Wednesday in the annual State of the University address.

“As chancellor of this magnificent institution, I tell you that the state of our university is strong, and growing stronger year after year,” Muñoz said.