Our city is #1 best place to live in USA

Evening twilight over Berkeley, California (Alfred Georg Sonsalla/Getty Images)

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Beloved city has neighborhoods and Cal (UC)

What is the healthiest city in the U.S. to live in? Niche.com did its annual analysis, and a California destination came out on top.

Berkeley, California, was named the healthiest city in the USA by niche.com. The Northern California Alameda County city (just across the bay from overpriced San Francisco) enjoys an average of 256 sunny days each year and a mild Mediterranean climate, allowing residents to spend ample time outdoors.

• The strangest thing about attending UC Berkeley is that no one here calls it "Berkeley." Everyone refers to it as "Cal" (or Cal Berkeley) because "Berkeley" (so often misspelled as Berkley) refers to the city, which is also sometimes called the "Republic of Berserkley" and F everywhere else because this is the best place to go to college, the greatest public university in the world since Nalanda and Timbuktu closed, rivaling the great private universities of the nation. (Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal likely exists because Berkeley exists and, strange and counterintuitive as it may seem to outsiders, half-baked L.A. is more spiritual than Berkeley or S.F. probably because it needs to be, with so many people desperately searching for meaning in the throat chakra of the planet (thanks in large part to Hollywood film, music, radio, and TV industries). That surprised us, thinking we were going to the Shangri-La of the state where everyone would be spiritual, where the Sixties would still be alive, where San Francisco was just a BART ride away to visit Golden Gate Park and join a love in, be in, or free concert, slipping over to Haight Ashbury, but it's always so cold, and Berkeley mostly empties out for the summer when the tourists come and classes are not in session. There is KPFA.org (the founding Pacifica station even older than KPFK.org in LA, where Alan Watts got his start and where he lives on, respectively). There are so many protests on campus and in Berkeley that there is a nationwide media blackout about it. One rarely hears about all that is going on there, and every week something IS going on there. It's a nearly daily occurrence the mainstream media keeps quiet, ignores, and suppresses so that the radicalism doesn't spread as quickly to other campuses across the nation. It is the most progressive of the big schools.
• Vintage 1980’s Berkeley “Berzerkley” SF artist artwork - Etsy
• College Confidential Forums - Admissions Discussions

• In this famous scene (and song) Ben, "The Graduate" (played by a young Dustin Hoffman), is driving his red convertible to Berkeley, which is funny because he's headed the wrong direction, but that never stopped Hollywood (who needed to show him with the top down, which wouldn't look as good on the lower level that runs toward Berkeley. He's from Los Angeles and going to UC Berkeley in Berkeley to see about a girl, Elaine, which is odd because she's the daughter of Mrs. Robinson, the older married woman he's been having an affair with all summer. Had it not been for a roommate at Cal, I would never have known to see such an important film all about the wonders of legendary California.

Each year, Niche.com reveals the healthiest places in the nation, based on "a comprehensive assessment of the general health levels among residents in an area." The company considers key indicators of personal health, including smoking and excessive alcohol consumption, rates of obesity, and people's access and proximity to health care facilities, including gyms, doctors, and mental health practitioners.

And this year, Niche.com named Berkeley, California, the healthiest city in the U.S. The Alameda County city is less than half an hour from San Francisco [depending on traffic on the Bay Bridge, it would only take 15 minutes to go between the two] and boasts 256 sunny days per year [but is nearly always cooler than one would think, just like San Francisco is chilly and foggy] and a mild Mediterranean climate.

Residents don't have to travel far to enjoy time in nature and stay active. Why? — Berkeley has over 50 parks with sports facilities, trails, and playgrounds. [There's a secret swimming lake behind the campus, up the mountain on Grizzly Trail.] Additionally, places like Muir Woods National Monument, Yosemite National Park, and Pinnacles National Park offer even more options for outdoor recreation.

In fact, the city was named the No. 1 Healthiest Place to Live in America and the No. 1 Healthiest City, really driving home the point that this is indeed a healthy place.

Berkeley also snagged an A+ rating for its schools, A+ for nightlife, and an A+ for outdoor activities, which surely helps to keep its population in tip-top shape.

The only categories it falls short in are housing, where it scored a C-, crime and safety, which also nabbed it a C-, and the cost of living, where it scored a low D+. And these grades are well reflected in the local reviews. More

• MSN.com, June 7, 2025; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

The Graduate: Paul Simon on going deaf, God, death

Paul Simon contemplates faith, Death, and the existence of [the Jewish] God

(Q with Tom Power) June 20, 2023. Q Host Tom Power sits down with Paul Simon -- who wrote the hit music for the comedy The Graduate -- at the musician’s home near Austin, Texas, to discuss the inspiration for his 15th and latest album, Seven Psalms, and the Big questions it explores. Podcast: link.chtbl.com.

Who's Paul Simon? Dick Cavett finds out

Paul Simon on his writing process for "Bridge Over Troubled Water"

(The Dick Cavett Show) American musician Paul Simon explains the song writing process for Simon and Garfunkel's hit "Bridge Over Troubled Water," which aired April 9, 1970.

ABOUT: Dick Cavett has been nominated for 11 Emmy Awards (the most recent in 2012 for the HBO special Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again) and won three. Spanning five decades, Dick Cavett’s TV career has defined excellence in the interview format. He started at ABC in 1968, and also enjoyed success on PBS, USA, and CNBC. His most recent television successes were the September 2014 PBS special, Dick Cavett’s Watergate, followed April 2015 by Dick Cavett’s Vietnam. He has appeared in movies, TV specials, TV commercials, and several Broadway plays. He starred in an off-Broadway production of Hellman v. McCarthy in 2014 and reprised the role at Theatre 40 in Los Angeles February 2015. Cavett has published four books beginning with Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983), co-authored with Christopher Porterfield. His two recent books -- Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (2010) and Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic moments, and Assorted Hijinks (October 2014) -- are both collections of his online opinion column, written for The New York Times since 2007. Additionally, he has written for The New Yorker, TV Guide, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. #PaulSimon #DickCavett #BridgeOverTroubledWater

Transcendentalism on Walden POOL (video)

Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly, Wiki edits

Gustav Holst (13Orcun) Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Op. 26, Two Eastern Pictures (1911)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendentalism is an American movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States.

It arose as a reaction to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.

The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was of great interest.

 

Sarah Margaret Fuller

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the biblical criticism...the skepticism of David Hume," and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism.

• Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg is regarded as a pervasive influence on transcendentalism by Miller and Versluis.
• Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, particularly the Upanishads, also strongly influenced it.

Author on KPFA, Berkeley

A core belief of transcendentalism is in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Adherents believe that society and its government institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

 

Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective knowledge (inner knowing, direct intuition of the heart) over objective empiricism (experts dictating from their experiments and heads).

Transcendatalists agree that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little reliance or deference to past "masters." More

The Graduate's Ben Braddock is just drifting along on his parents' California pool all summer.

Civil Disobedience

Thoreau's writing restored Walden Pond.

Civil Disobedience is an 1849 essay by American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. It argues that individuals should resist permitting governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences.

We have a duty to resist and avoid allowing such acquiescence that enables the government to make us the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated, in part, by his disgust with American slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

Who was Thoreau?

Henry David Thoreau, August 1861

Henry David Thoreau, while living in Walden Woods for two years beginning in 1845, was an American Transcendentalist contemplating Walden Pond's features.

In "The Ponds" section of Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau extols the water's physical properties.

He details its unparalleled water quality, clarity, color, temperature, unique animal life (aquatic, avian, mammalian), rock formations and bed and, especially, its mirror-like surface properties.

 

We can live in forests our own with Nature.

Thoreau contemplates the source of the pristine water body in the woods. He observes that it had no visible inlet or outlet, and considers the possibility of an unidentified spring at the bottom.

Noting the kettle landform's ramparts and resilient shore, he concludes that a unique, natural geologic event (glacial retreat) formed the site, while recognizing local myths:

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for...one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond.

In "The Ponds" Thoreau describes incorporeal experiences around the water.

These experiences were relayed to him by others and his own. Thoreau -- who was a well read Transcendentalist and, therefore, presumably intimately familiar with Romanticism -- relates the stories in a way that could be argued to interpret or reveal the pond as the locale of the Grail Legend in the Americas.

An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it....

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grapevines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive... More

The Graduate POOL was my Walden Pond

The Graduate's Ben ("Son" played by Dustin Hoffman), boyfriend of "Mrs. Robinson," on the pool in idyllic California. It's the 50 year anniversary,* and we're barely realizing the connection.

• FilmWeek screening of The Graduate, hosted by Lovery
• June 2, 2018, 7:00-10:30 pm @ The Theatre at Ace Hotel 933 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015

*Mike Nichols’s romantic comedy-drama The Graduate recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. It is in the Top 20 of the American Film Institute’s best American movies list and has the distinction of being the last film to win an Academy Award for best director and nothing else (despite being nominated in six other categories).

Sex, Science, and Drama (audio play)

L.A. Theatre Works (The Play's the Thing, KPFK.org)

MP3 Audio: "Completeness" (Part 1 and 2)
A pair of brainy graduate students fall in love while tackling some of science’s biggest unsolved questions. But can their book-smarts help them through the innate uncertainties of romance? Jason Ritter and Mandy Siegfried star in Completeness by Itamar Moses.

 
With Andre Sogliuzzo and Mia Barron. Stage manager: Amanda Allen. Live sound effects by Michael Rhea. Associate producer: Christina Montano. Original music and sound design by Bray Poor. Editing by Wes Dewberry. Recording, mixing, and additional sound design by Mark Holden for the Invisible Studios, West Hollywood. Our director is Stephen Sachs.

• This play is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series featuring science-themed plays. Major funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to enhance public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

The Relativity Series is an ongoing series featuring science-themed plays. The series currently includes 20 plays on topics from astronomy, physics, and cosmology to the mathematics of code-breaking, the ethics of scientific research, and the invention of television. 

It is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science and technology. The Relativity Series presents science as a thoroughly human endeavor, bringing to life the people and stories behind the research and invention that shapes and changes our world.

• Stream the entire RELATIVITY SERIES