Uc Berkeley
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Behind the odd phenomenon of either adoring or despising the friendly faced bots
Recently, tragedy struck in Berkeley. As finals approached, Kiwibot, a local startup whose food-delivery robots have become fixtures of Berkeley’s sidewalks, sent out an email to users with the subject line “☠⚰️Kiwi is no more.”
Most people assumed that the company was shutting down. The bots, which wink and flash heart eyes at its passersby, had been slinging boba and burgers to University of California Berkeley students since 2017 (and since then, have deployed on several other college campuses.) The picnic-basket-size machines have become a sort of unofficial mascot for UC Berkeley students — people stop to take pictures with…
We asked a public-policy expert if that was even possible.
Last week, on February 1, hundreds of protesters arrived in downtown Berkeley to push back against a planned on-campus speech by white-supremacist writer Milo Yiannopoulos. In the evening, the protest turned into a mild riot, and Yiannopoulous’s speech was canceled. (See our photo essay on the riot.) The next morning, Donald Trump took to his favorite digital megaphone to defend hate speech and threaten to defund the Golden Bears:
The Bold Italic
Celebrating the free-wheeling spirit of the Bay Area — one sentence at a time.
