Alexandra Natapoff on Snitching

Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School, characterizes snitching not as a single act but as an entire system of law enforcement and criminal justice. Especially since the War on Drugs began, she said, the U.S. has seen an increase in the use of informants and “the trading away of guilt,” changing the way we mete out justice, the length of sentences, the determination of who to prosecute, and the prison system. “Everybody knows if they come up with information about each other,” Natapoff said of prisoners, “they can …

More In: At the Office

Joyce Appleby on Capitalism’s History

Joyce Appleby, author of The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, stopped by Zócalo’s offices to explain why capitalism is a cultural system rather than a purely economic one. She …

Colette LaBouff Atkinson Reads “Ghost Squad”

Colette LaBouff Atkinson, Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine this year, is a couple months into her post …

Is Cool Dead?

Ted Gioia, author of The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, dropped by Zócalo’s office to explain why the hip, ironic pose we’ve come to know as “coolness” is over, …

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta on Google

New Yorker media columnist Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, stopped by Zócalo to chat about whether Google is evil, whether information …

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on the Virtues of Forgetting

It’s clear that Facebook and Myspace have changed the way we remember. Birth dates are posted, contact information unnecessary, and photographs plentiful. But the Internet has also changed the way …