Zócalo Public Square

Between 1975 and 2007, incarceration rates in the United States increased nearly fivefold. But over the last decade, California has slowly turned away from mass incarceration, reducing its prison population and changing criminal sentencing and other law enforcement practices to give more people more second chances. What has California done right in this transformation, and where has it fallen shor...

Surely, every debate about Abraham Lincoln has been had, and every story told—from his childhood splitting rails and his battle with depression to his cabinet of former rivals and his assassination. Yet over 150 years after Lincoln’s death, new details about Honest Abe still emerge to surprise us—and even stir up some contemporary controversy. A new exploration of a little-known 1864 episode shine...

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 continued with “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” Civilization faces existential threats—pandemics, climate change, nuclear proliferation, runaway technologies—that seem to require...

The inauguration of Kamala Harris was a moment of many firsts—the first woman, the first Black woman, the first woman of color, the first person of South Asian heritage, even the first California Democrat to become vice president. But this moment has been punctuated by an eruption of hatred and violence, and further evidence of America's bitter divisions, making it difficult to celebrate Harris's...

Social media polarizes us. Political propaganda deluges us. And misinformation and disinformation seem to spread as quickly as COVID-19. So where can we go to find stories, analysis, and messengers we can trust? Scholars say that high-quality, fact-based local news organizations—based in our own communities and staffed by diverse and responsible journalists who are also our neighbors—can inoculate...

Robotic trucks are beginning to roll out, carrying cargo and promises of revolutionizing freight hauling, reducing traffic, and lowering pollution. But previous waves of automation have eliminated millions of jobs in the United States. And a transformation in truck driving could come with big costs for the 3.5 million truckers who toil in one of America’s most enduring occupations and play an outs...

America’s higher education system faces a crisis of legitimacy. Colleges and universities, while promoting themselves as forces for social mobility, have stacked the deck against their neediest students. Rising college costs, skyrocketing student debt, and increasingly out-of-touch curricula are leading more Americans to question the fairness and value of higher education. What is right, and what...

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 began with “What Would Society Look Like Without Police?” All over the world, law enforcement violence and corruption have reignited anti-racism movements that seek the reform and defunding of p...

Since World War II, the United States has famously funded research to advance all fields of science and innovation. The resulting wave of discovery and knowledge has benefited Americans by creating new disease-fighting drugs, increasing economic productivity, and sparking an information revolution through advances like the internet and GPS. Yet not everyone has benefited from innovation equally, a...

One hundred years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, Zócalo and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County present When Women Vote, a three-event series that concluded with “What Are Today’s L.A. Women Fighting For?” Women have made Los Angeles one of the nation’s most progressive cities, fighting for their own rights as well as those of children, laborers, immigrants, and other underr...

If you commit murder in the United States, there’s a 40 percent chance you’ll get away with it. That shocking statistic belies other realities; you have better than even odds of getting away with murder if you kill people who are poor, powerless, or non-white, or if you do your murdering in less wealthy and developed places. Why are Americans willing to tolerate such widespread failure to achieve...

“What do we do now?” asks Robert Redford at the end of “The Candidate,” the 1972 political satire that ends in an election upset—and existential despair. After a presidential election defined by an international pandemic and rampant misinformation and a post-election period that seems destined to be marked by bitterness and conflict, America must ask itself the same plaintive question. What comes...

Few Californians pay attention to state government (much less visit the state Capitol), and few of us even bother to vote in elections for our weak local governments. So our officials are often elected by the campaign dollars of rich people, powerful developers, and a handful of labor unions. But when crisis hits California—as it so often does—we are quick to demand action and to lash out at polit...

The conventional American narrative since the civil rights era has been that states tend to violate our rights, and the federal government intervenes to protect people. But much of American history runs the other way, offering numerous examples of states acting to protect the rights of their people—notably Indigenous peoples, African Americans escaping slavery, and undocumented immigrants—from fed...

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 proclaimed that celestial objects are “the province of all mankind.” But so far, space travel has been a costly and exclusive province (fewer than 600 people have been in orbit). Today’s headlines about space are dominated by billionaires who dream of escaping their Earth-bound lives or providing new tourist thrills. And the biggest space travel successes in recent m...

Many Americans of Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian heritage have thrived in the U.S. through perseverance, resilience, education, and upward mobility, despite waves of discrimination both overt and hidden. Now, COVID-19 has escalated xenophobia and anti-Asian prejudices—from references to “Kung Flu” or the “Chinese virus” to acts of violence across the country. What strategies and tools can help...

The United States—once revered for its political stability—now seems gripped by political mania. American discourse, particularly around government and elections, is full of conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia, and overheated denunciations. Such hysteria might be the product of more recent economic dislocation, failed wars, the digital revolution, or divisive elected officials. But perhaps i...

Across the world, elite politicians, militaries, and powerful business and political groups appear to have a monopoly on representative democracy. By exploiting the resulting discontent, populists and authoritarians have created an international narrative of democracy in decline. But in many regions and countries, including some ruled by autocrats, citizens are collaborating with local and provinc...

Since 1964, more women than men have voted in every United States presidential election. Yet we still don’t have a woman president or vice president; California, one of the first states to give women the right to vote, is one of 20 states that still hasn’t had a female governor, and Los Angeles has never had a female mayor. Why do women remain much less likely than men to run for office, despite t...

Imagine a society where truth and knowledge have no value, people are glued to their screens, and world war feels imminent. Or think of a place enraptured by the seductive promises of a carnival-hawker con man. Sound familiar? The first, of course, is the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451, the story of a firefighter charged with burning books in order to destroy knowledge. The second is the fictional Gre...

There are few forces of nature more formidable than a group of women fed up with the status quo. From the French Revolution—which was sparked in part by a 7,000-woman march from Paris to Versailles—to Black Lives Matter—which was founded by three women—some of the most important protest movements in global history have been women-led. In addition to organizing many of summer 2020’s continuing marc...

What is the relationship between American economics and American racism, and can it be severed? How will systemic racism, past and present, slow our emergence from the current downturn? New York Times journalist Eduardo Porter, author of the new book American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, visited Zócalo with historian and writer Cynthia Greenlee to discuss economic disparitie...

From Australia to the Amazon to the American West, megafires—wildfires that burn more than 100,000 acres of land—have grown so frequent, large, and deadly that they’ve forced a reevaluation of how human societies coexist with fire. In a warming world, governments are confronting whether we must retreat from certain places to survive in a fierier world. Have fires become too big for people and the...

On Wednesday, June 24, the latest UCLA Anderson Forecast predicted a difficult economic future for California and reported that the U.S. economy is in a "Depression-like crisis." What does this mean for California’s pressing long-term problems, especially housing? Could this depression offer opportunities to make housing more affordable in an expensive state? Jerry Nickelsburg, economist and direc...

What is the history behind the president’s style of rhetoric, and what does the past tell us about how to counteract it? Jennifer Mercieca, historian of rhetoric and author of Demagogue for President, visited Zócalo with William Sturkey, historian and author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White. They traded questions and insights into the history behind the president’s words, live o...