Zócalo Public Square

It feels like it’s time for something new. Facebook and Kanye just changed their names. More than half of Americans want to change jobs, and one-third want to switch careers. Businesses are reinventing the way they operate. And social movements are trying to create new systems that are anti-racist and sustainable. Isn’t all this easier said than done? Even after confronting the challenges of the p...

Pretty much every dinosaur skeleton you see has been painstakingly excavated from rock by people with precision, skill, and creativity. What they don’t have are paleontology degrees, and what they don’t get is money or credit. In fact, fossil preparators are mostly enthusiastic volunteers who come from all different backgrounds and receive their training on the job. Their unsung work creates the f...

Calls are growing for the dismantling of the meritocracy—educational systems and economic structures that claim to elevate individuals based on merit, but instead favor those with wealth or racial privilege. As elites turn against the very merit-based systems that elevated them, governments, corporations, schools, and other entities are extending old policies—like affirmative action—and embracing...

We are failing Americans without college degrees. Research shows that up to 30 million workers without four-year degrees are drastically underpaid, and have the skills to earn 70 percent more than what they’re currently making. What accounts for this failure of the labor market? One problem is that traditional resumes don’t show or verify the full range of a worker’s skills—including those gained...

Over the past year, directors of cultural institutions across Los Angeles have announced their retirements, which means a new generation of cultural leadership is upon us. But despite a desire for change that seems nearly universal, new directors must still answer to many of the same funders and face the same pressures as their predecessors—to raise money or sell tickets, to scale up, to stay rele...

To merely open a bank account or secure a driver’s license, people around the world face one common barrier: paperwork. Americans, in fact, spend 11.4 billion hours a year on federal paperwork alone. Harvard legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has a name for this kind of drudgery: sludge. Sludge, he argues, doesn’t j...

The United States has more firearms (390 million) than people (325 million), routinely experiences mass shootings, and suffers rates of gun violence far higher than other wealthy countries. California has touted itself as a safer model, with the most gun regulations in the country, the 44th lowest rate of gun violence among the 50 states, and a 9 percent decrease in gun deaths over the last decade...

Laboratories around the world are under fire for their lack of diversity, a culture of harassment and bullying, rigid hierarchies, and research that cannot be reproduced. Is the entire research system to blame? Our model of funding individual scientists encourages cutthroat competition rather than a cooperative infrastructure better tailored to solving our biggest problems. In a recent article for...

South Los Angeles, one of the West Coast’s last great working-class places, has been a destination point for two great migrations: African Americans arriving from the South and East, and, more recently, Latin Americans immigrating to Southern California. While media have long dwelled on examples of interracial and interethnic conflict there, the everyday reality of South L.A.’s ever-changing neigh...

When Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926, she beat the record of every man who’d attempted it before her—by two hours. And she did it in a two-piece bathing suit that she’d fashioned herself, eschewing the bulky wool dress, stockings, and shoes expected to be worn by women swimmers for modesty’s sake. Before Title IX’s 1972 passage, Ederle, and pioneering spo...

California’s smaller cities are pitied, when they’re thought about at all. Media coverage of towns, especially in rural areas, emphasize their poverty, their lack of amenities and people, or their supposedly clannish cultures or peripheral politics. But the reality is that small towns stand at the center of California’s biggest challenges—climate, energy, inequality, public health, education, wate...

Today, more than one-quarter of all unsheltered people in the United States live in L.A. County. And of all Angelenos experiencing homelessness, more than 70 percent are sleeping in the streets, or in makeshift structures, tents, or vehicles. Homelessness has always been a public health and humanitarian crisis, but the crisis has been exacerbated by the continued lack of affordable housing and the...

Zócalo and the University of Toronto present The World We Want, an event series exploring our current societal, political, and economic challenges and how we might emerge from the current moment. The series ends with “Can We Still Find the Good in the World?” It feels like such a dark time. The planet is burning with hatred, disease, and environmental degradation. And, between the confusing nature...

As Los Angeles emerges from pandemic and tumult, Angelenos are looking for new and bigger visions of the city’s future. But where will we find ideas and practical methods for transforming institutions, reimagining public policy, or reinvesting in communities? Business leaders are consumed with recovery. Elected officials aren’t trusted, because they have long failed to deliver on their biggest pla...

Boyle Heights may be divided up by L.A. freeways and thoroughfares, but its people have a remarkable record of maintaining solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. What explains the ability of Boyle Heights residents to stick together while constantly integrating immigrants and incorporating newcomers? How has Boyle Heights kept its distinctive identity in the face of social upheaval, political...

The year 1924 was a watershed in American immigration. A victory for the eugenics movement, the Johnson-Reed Act established race-based quotas that succeeded in limiting the entry of Jews and Catholics from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as strengthening restrictions already in place barring the entry of Asians and Africans. It would take an extraordinary political window following the assas...

“I intend to live forever, or die trying,” said Groucho Marx. Distinguishing between life and its end may be easy for comedians, even immortal ones. But the task has proven surprisingly hard for biologists, who know too much about nature’s bewildering diversity. Modern science, for all its breakthroughs, has yet to produce a standard definition for life. What does it mean to be alive—and how have...

The Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein, author of the new book Rock Me on the Water: 1974- The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, visits Zócalo to examine the complicated relationship between pop and politics. Tonight’s online event is moderated by Sandy Banks, columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Read more about our panelists here: https://zps.la/3cjL6OA Fo...

Every year scientists who have made great inventions receive Nobel Prizes recognizing their “benefit to humankind.” Yet for all the profound ways scientific progress has impacted our lives, many inventions have affected the world in ways that their creators did not imagine. Some innovations, created for peaceful purposes, have been used in war; others have had unintended environmental or health ef...

Zócalo and the University of Toronto present The World We Want, an event series exploring our current societal, political, and economic challenges and how we might emerge from the current moment. The series includes “How Do Our Cities Prepare for the Post-Apocalypse?” It’s too late to prevent the apocalypse. Because it’s already here. A virus spreads globally, creating a pandemic, as yet uncontrol...

A new, bold generation of women leaders is ascending in America. They haven’t entirely ditched the pantsuit, but they have embraced eye-catching colors, up-and-coming designers, and statement-making clothes and accessories. Which means these women have also opened themselves up to the risks—and rewards—inherent in such choices. This past election cycle had no shortage of iconic fashion moments, fr...

Global security depends on everyone having enough food. Scientist Molly Jahn started her career inventing squashes and melons. But that work led her to wonder and worry about the security of our global food supply in the face of changing climate, growing population, and new forms of war. What does “food security” really mean in the 21st century? Why hasn’t food security been a bigger part of natio...

Over the last 500 years, 755 animal species and 123 plant species have gone extinct. One species can take primary responsibility for this mass annihilation: homo sapiens. From hunting and fishing to factories and farming, humans (with the assistance of diseases and other natural disasters) have managed to decimate large swaths of the planet. But beginning in the late 18th century, one group of peo...

2020 was the year that women emerged indisputably as the world’s most successful leaders, from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s COVID responses to German Chancellor Angela Merkel saving the eurozone and minimizing damage from Brexit. But perhaps more important was the growing success of transnational feminist movements. For more than a decade, networks...

Men have been running the free world since men invented the term “free world.” But from the success of Jacinda Ardern and Angela Merkel at combating the pandemic to the ascension of Kamala Harris to the White House, women are demonstrating their strength as leaders more visibly than ever before. And over the past seven years, Sweden, Canada, France, Luxembourg, and Mexico all have adopted or pledg...