This Week Zócalo Minds Your Business

We Get Involved In Your Diet, Your Jury Duty Evasion, and Your Mayoral Elections in Places We Don’t Live

One Man, Two Votes—Why Not?: Zócalo’s California Editor and South Pasadena resident Joe Mathews argues that with L.A’s miserably low turnout in city elections, the city needs all the voters it can get.  So why shouldn’t he vote in both L.A. and South Pasadena?  Besides, wouldn’t permitting neighboring non-residents to vote in L.A. elections, or in the elections of any major California regional city, be good for us all?

 

California’s Successful Dilettantes: We owe a lot to California’s tinkerers—the free spirits and freethinkers who know a little about a lot of things and just enough to think differently, writes Alex Foege. Several innovations stemming from the California hippie culture include The Whole Earth Catalog, Apple’s first Macintosh computer, and the light bulbs used in Disney’s Fantasia.

 

We’re Going To Attack Your Donut Eating On All Fronts: On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Jonathan Fielding, University of Minnesota social psychologist Traci Mann, and UCLA health economist Frederick J. Zimmerman visited Zócalo to discuss whether health propaganda works and how it will play out in the years ahead.

 

In Praise of Good Jurors, Big Fish, and Christian Emperors: The largest marlin ever caught on rod and reel (as opposed to commercially) was a black marlin caught off the coast of Peru in 1953 that weighed 1,560 pounds, had a girth of 6 feet 9 inches, and measured 14 feet 6 inches across. Talk about big fish to fry! Check out more fun facts in this week’s The Six-Point Inspection.

 

This Is Your Brain on Health Propaganda: For centuries, public health campaigns have long been used to sway human behavior. We asked a variety of people in public health to name their favorite health propaganda efforts in world history.

 

I Was the First Woman to Run For Mayor of L.A.: The first woman and Latina to run for mayor of Los Angeles, Linda Griego, writes that if Jan Perry and Wendy Gruel win the mayoral race, it will be as candidates, not as women. Finally.

 

Historian Tim Naftali in the green room: Before visiting Zócalo to discuss Nixon’s legacy, Tim Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, sat down in the green room to reveal his guilty pleasure, his most-used phrase, and the strangest question he’s ever been asked about Richard Nixon.

 

Next week …

Author, journalist, and historian Garry Wills writes about sex and the Catholic Church.

 

Elba Esther Gordillo, aka “La Maestra,” is behind bars for misappropriating millions of dollars of Mexico’s education funds on plastic surgery, private jets, and shopping sprees to Neiman Marcus. David Sasaki writes about what her arrest means for Mexico.

 

On Wednesday, a panel featuring Washington Post education columnist and The War Against Dummy Math author Jay Mathews visits Zócalo to ask whether math is important to the national future.


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