Zócalo Public Square

Ever since Americans first likened Cuba to a damsel in distress — two hundred years ago, when the island country was under threat from imperial Spain — we have seen Cuba as less of a country than an idea. The neighboring nation appears alternately innocent and menacing, culturally exotic or repressed by government, an edenic place to escape or a retrograde regime from which refugees flee. With tra...

From the tender age of 20, when he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Julian Bond has been at the forefront of civil rights activism in America. Now, more than 50 years into his civil rights career, he serves as an elder statesman for the movement. In between, he served for two decades in the Georgia State Legislature, chaired the NAACP from 1998 to 2009, worked as the fir...

Mentoring programs like Big Brothers, Big Sisters have been highly touted as a way to keep troubled kids off the streets. But can an outsider who has never been homeless or been recruited into a gang actually help a kid who knows those experiences all too well? A quarter-century ago, John Prendergast, now one of the most prominent activists on human rights issues in Africa, took on a 7-year-old “l...

We like to think we have choices, but when it comes to health care in California, geography is destiny. If you live in Clear Lake, you are ten times more likely to have an elective cardiac stent or angioplasty than if you live in nearby Sonoma -- whether or not that's the right treatment for you. Women who live in El Centro are 22 times less likely than women who live in Greenbrae to have a vagina...

The new maps that will create boundaries for California’s political districts will be certified in August, but will they actually change the state’s political landscape? Zócalo invites a panel including Kathay Feng, director of California Common Cause and one of the authors of the 2008 redistricting reform bill; Steven Ochoa, national redistricting coordinator for MALDEF, the Mexican American Lega...

Conflicts between Mexican national character traits and the current state of the country are abundant, former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda argues. As Mexico sits at a crossroads, with its future path very much undecided, Castañeda says those paradoxes must be resolved. He visits Zócalo to discuss what makes up the national character, and how it can determine the nation's fate.

Many stories from Mexico -- from the high poverty rate to the flourishing economy to the booming cultural scene -- don't get much media attention because drug trafficking and related violence take up so much of reporters' energy. Mexico City-based news producer Susana Seijas, Belo TV border bureau chief Angela Kocherga, Dallas Morning News Mexico City bureau chief Alfredo Corchado, Los Angeles Tim...

The number of prominent people who lie under oath has reached epic proportions, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Stewart. For wealthy, successful people like Barry Bonds, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart and Bernard Madoff, the risks of perjury far outweigh the possible benefits, yet they lie anyway. Stewart visits Zócalo to discuss why they do it and what it means for the rest...

Most people agree that California’s political system is broken, and experts say one major hurdle to fixing it is citizens’ disengagement. The voter registration rate is among the lowest in the country, and just one-third of residents report talking about politics at least a few times a week – putting the state 46th nationwide. Zócalo presents a panel of experts including Pete Peterson, executive d...

Poverty and low social status have long been shown to correlate with shorter lives among many groups of Americans. The inequities have important consequences for California and the nation as a whole, but what can we do about it? Zócalo presents a panel including Larry Adelman, creator and executive producer of the documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?; Tony Iton, senior vice...

Humans rely on trees for oxygen and food, but also shade and beauty, creating a tension that imbues the relationship with meaning. Trees are part of every aspect of human life and are amply represented in literature, music and art. Farmer David "Mas" Masumoto, artist Jennifer Steinkamp and environmental studies professor Nadlini Nadkarni discuss the many facets of that connection in a panel modera...

Many scholars and activists have raised alarms about the world getting worse, but economist Charles Kenny disagrees. In his new book Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding -- And How We Can Improve the World Even More, Kenny catalogs several measures -- literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality and more -- that have improved globally. Kenny visits Zócalo to discuss his research and...

Gandhi's impact on his native India is unquestioned, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld argues the Mahatma's biographers have not sufficiently explored how his 21 years in South Africa shaped his philosophies and strategies. Lelyvled, the former executive editor of The New York Times and author of the new book Great Soul, visits Zócalo to discuss what Gandhi learned in South Africa...

When a neighbor killed his wife and himself in 2000, Peter Lovenheim decided he needed to get to know the people living around him. He started with meetings at Starbucks and moved up to spending a night at each of their homes. The result was his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, which was chosen as the winner of Zócalo Public Square'...

Journalist and author Doug Saunders has spent years studying what he calls "arrival cities" -- the ramshackle neighborhoods on the outskirts of the world's biggest cities that are often the place new immigrants land. Arrival cities are often kept down by physical and bureaucratic barriers, he says, but their residents' drive to succeed makes the neighborhoods valuable to the urban area at large. S...

Less than 70 years after the official end of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China, Chinese American culture is all around us. Yet many of the leading examples -- from the the Charlie Chan detective novels of the 1920s to Amy Tan's bestseller The Joy Luck Club and Bruce Lee movies -- are insufficient to capture the full Chinese-American experience. Historian Mae Ngai m...

Neither hard power nor soft power will be the key to winning the race for prosperity or global influence tomorrow. Rather, says, Joseph Nye, author of The Future of Power, successful nations will deploy “smart power.” President Obama's decisions on Libya are a good example of smart power, he says. Nye joins Zócalo to discuss how power balances have changed in the global age, as new nations take th...

James Gleick, biographer, author and journalist, discusses his latest book on Information Theory entitled The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Yale Law School professor John Fabian Witt tells the hidden story of how in 1847 and 1848, on the road from Veracruz to Mexico City, the United States army invented the concept of the war crime as we know it today.

Award-winning writer, Susan Jacoby, most recently the author of Never Say Die: the Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2011), discussed the uncensored realities of growing old with an audience at The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. As the youngest baby boomers turn 65 this year, Jacoby warned that clinging to false hope about the future of ag...

Evgeny Morozov is a Stanford visiting scholar, Net Effect blogger, and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. He visited Zócalo to lecture on the ways authoritarian regimes manipulate New Media, noting trends in Iran, Egypt, China and even the United States.

Artist Shengtian Zheng, USC School of Architecture Dean Qingyun Ma and New York-Shangai-based artist Wenda Gu share a panel at the Getty Center to discuss the "New China", and the ruins of the old. Moderator Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, set up the evening as a historical narrative, weaving together politics and artistry to approach the issue.

games, and how to harness humanity’s creative potential for global improvement. Her new book is called Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011).

“The same idea in your head can be represented along with its contradiction.” At least that’s what Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, believes. Kurzban is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He joins Zocalo to explore the psychological causes of hypocricy, focusing on the specialized mind and the evolutionary benefit...

As the Superintendent of Finance for the rebel American government, Robert Morris instituted debt financing as the best means to pay for the costs of fighting the Revolution. But he was challenged by the refusal of many Americans to pay taxes. How can the U.S. pay for its policies without losing the support of Americans? Charles Rappleye, author of Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revoluti...