Reading Animal Farm in Zimbabwe
From Minority White Rule to Dictatorship and Beyond, Orwell’s 1945 Novel—Now in a New Translation—Has Proved Prescient
I began to notice Animal Farm references start to proliferate in Zimbabwe in 2008 …
I began to notice Animal Farm references start to proliferate in Zimbabwe in 2008 …
The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one …
For this fourth installment, our contributors think about how we might foster a public square that welcomes …
The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.
This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.
Here, our contributors consider the rich building blocks of the public square: personal connections. In our segmented, often lonely world, they are shaking off the blues on the dance floor …
Californians vote on many ballot measures, but we almost never participate in significant public debates and discussions about the measures’ contents and impacts.
This isn’t simply a result of apathy or poor civic education. Rather, it’s an example of “rational ignorance,” a term coined by the late Stanford-educated economist Anthony Downs in his 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy. The term defines this democratic reality: since you have just one vote out of millions, your individual vote doesn’t really matter. So, it’s rational to remain …
Confronting America’s history is like fixing or maintaining an old home: acknowledging the parts that are in disrepair, and those that are rotten to the core. This is the metaphor historian William Sturkey opened the fourth and final program in the Zócalo/Mellon Foundation series “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?,” …