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Why Does Math Matter?

Saturday, September 2 10:57 pm

Jennifer Ouellette was an English major who long "avoided all math," as she put it. Today, the science writer and author of The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse recalled asking her math teacher what every student wants to know: why does math matter in every day life? "He gave the usual stock answers," she said. "But when you start to see where calculus is in the real world, that's when you start to see where it's useful." Ouel...

Jesus Wars

Friday, September 1 11:47 pm

Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years by Philip Jenkins �Reviewed by Ralph Walter The difficult but critical doctrine that Jesus Christ is two different reflections of the same phenomenon � fully God and fully man in one being � was developed during late antiquity. It is one of that period�s great intellectual achievements, one that determined who Jesus Christ was, who he is today, and who he will...

How Much Do Monopolies Control?

Friday, September 1 5:54 pm

Staring down the aisle of a Wal-Mart or a Target, it doesn't seem that American consumers lack for choice. But Barry Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, demonstrates that for all the variety at the local branch of any chain retailer, the products come from the same handful of giants, monopolies that determine much of what we eat, drink, wear, and use. Lynn, who visits Z�calo on September 21 to explain how monopolies have destroyed the Ameri...

Why Did Obama Win?

Friday, September 1 3:30 pm

The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election by Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher The ruthless efficiency with which the Obama campaign dispatched the McCain-Palin ticket should put to rest the notion that our president is too disinterested in politics for his own good. Granted, McCain stumbled by declaring in the midst of the economic collapse that �the fundamentals of our economy are sound� and further hobbled h...

Why Our Weakest Ties Matter

Friday, September 1 2:52 pm

Superconnect: Harnessing the Power of Networks and the Strength of Weak Links by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood �Reviewed by Noelle Loh Before there was online social networking, there was plain old networking and the cliches that went along with it � six degrees of separation, it�s a small world. Superconnect, which claims to help readers �discover the laws of our superconnected world,� is littered with these truisms, making it seem like a guide mostly for those who still remain disconnecte...

How Does Democracy Work?

Friday, September 1 12:12 am

Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Life of American Democracy edited by Jedediah Purdy �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher The political scientist Adam Przeworski�s minimalist defense of democracy is that it is the best system for changing government without bloodshed � power changes hands by election, and the losers can take solace in knowing they will survive to fight another contest. But for Democratic Vistas, a collection of essays based on the DeVane lectures at Yale University, such nar...

The Book that Changed Europe

Sunday, August 31 6:40 pm

The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World by Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt �Reviewed by Ralph Walter The book that changed Europe isn�t the Bible. It isn�t the Koran. It is from the Enlightment, but it isn�t Newton�s Principia Mathematica or Spinoza�s Ethics or Diderot�s Encyclopaedia. Instead, Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt choose a rather obscure tome: Picart and Bernard�s Religious Ceremonies of...

The Last Outlaw Art Form?

Sunday, August 31 12:22 am

Everything from spray-paint scrawled initials to monumental publicly-funded murals might be called street art, but most of the pieces in Trespass: A History of Uncommisioned Urban Art fall somewhere in between � unsanctioned but appreciated, sometimes quite widely, and even tacitly allowed. Still, the works benefit from being made and seen in places where they shouldn�t be � as famed street artist Banksy puts it in his brief introduction, ��beyond the �No Entry� sign everything happens in higher...

Taking Down a Mosque

Saturday, August 30 12:04 am

Mohamed's Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland by Stephan Salisbury �Reviewed by Angilee Shah The introduction to Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Stephan Salisbury�s investigative memoir Mohamed�s Ghosts is titled �How to Take Down A Mosque.� It�s an eye-grabber for anyone who is watching closely the controversy around the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque slated to be built in Lower Manhattan. But Salisbury�s book takes us to another mosque in a rundo...

In a Bright

Thursday, August 29 10:53 pm

by Cecelia Hagen i In a bright in a field the breath held &nb...

Lawrence Bender

Saturday, August 24 10:22 pm

Lawrence Bender is a film producer well-known for his long collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, dating back to �Reservoir Dogs� and continuing to �Inglorious Basterds�. But Bender�s work on �An Inconvenient Truth� brought him offers to make more documentaries on a similar theme��The Inconvenient Truth of Blank,� he joked. His latest effort, �Countdown to Zero�, which Z�calo and KCRW screened at the Arclight Hollywood, takes a look at the history and present-day danger of nuclear weapons. Be...

Delayed Flight

Saturday, August 18 10:19 pm

by David Allen Sullivan A tree rose up her back, wolves coursed over one shoulder. ...

Are the Experts Wrong?

Saturday, August 18 10:15 pm

Wrong: Why experts keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them by David H. Freedman �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher The promise that something as ordinary as coffee or red wine can do something extraordinary � extend your lifespan,� make you smarter � is hard to resist. But David H. Freedman thinks such wisdom, along with all the other tidbits proffered by scientists, business gurus, and various other experts, should be ignored. As he puts it, �expert wisdom usually turns out t...

Beyond the Border Line

Friday, August 17 10:13 pm

The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Tyche Hendricks �Reviewed by Erica E Phillips Beyond its physical demarcation, the border between the United States and Mexico is, above all, a region � and one rich with humanity. In her first book, veteran immigration reporter Tyche Hendricks has compiled many of the stories she came across during her travels through the region, characterizing it as �defined by its proximity to the border and to the countr...

Monica Ganas on the Meaning of California

Thursday, August 16 11:11 pm

Before Monica Ganas began teaching California, she lived it. A native of the state and a 30 year veteran of the entertainment industry and now a professor at Azusa Pacific University, Ganas explained how her personal background inspired her book, Under the Influence: California's Intoxicating Spiritual and Cultural Impact on America. "I think I've been trying to make sense of my personal experience for a lot of my life," she joked. It wasn't until she left the state that she began to see its...

a creature to run from

Wednesday, August 15 11:40 pm

by Jennifer Smith but I wasn't the red bull of the setting sun, the green dragon bearded with age, singed gold plating his scales, the harpy, the gorgon the maenad, or sphinx asking for your love through death turned to stone, bare bones slips of skin left around, just a girl who said too much styled in smiles, willing to do a million favors. I might as well have been tsunami, avalanche, earthquake or hurricane, might as well have been the crow at your ...

Living Off the Grid

Wednesday, August 15 11:35 pm

Nick Rosen was in New York in 2003 when the lights went out for 50 million people across the northeast. �It got me wondering about the silent, invisible electricity grid � we all depend on it, but we never think about it,� he said. Going off the grid wasn't an entirely new idea for Rosen, author of Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. He's the owner of �an old shepherd's hut in a beautiful part of Spain,� he explained. �S...

How Democratic is Iran?

Sunday, August 12 11:14 pm

Stephen Kinzer has reported from over 50 countries on five continents, including those with some of the most vexing relationships with the U.S. In his latest book, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future, Kinzer argues that the U.S. should look to some unexpected partners for a smarter Middle East strategy � Iran and Turkey, the only Muslim countries with deep democratic roots. "Iran, although it has this repressive theocratic government, is a tremendously vibrant society," he said. "This ...

What's the Price of Luxury?

Sunday, August 12 12:29 am

Einstein's Watch: Being an Unofficial Record of a Year's Most Ownable Things by Jolyon Fenwick & Marcus Husselby �Reviewed by Noelle Loh Despite a still reeling economy, a Trump penthouse can still fetch $33.18 million, Bentley is launching its new $349,000 Mulsanne supercar and Chanel is raising prices of its posh pochettes by as much as 30 percent. What exactly determines the value of material goods and, more importantly, what drives a person to want to possess them? According t...

Singles in Your Area

Sunday, August 12 12:29 am

by Luke Reid Loneliness, in its supreme design, scours living down to a nerve. How keenly you quiver at the faintest Hello, the chance to say I�m fine. Waiting in the checkout line you eye the cashier with woozy belief and think: I could enter her life. It would be different this time. As if the thread that patterns your mistakes (to push what loves you clean away) could untwist itself from your DNA. Much safer here, where the body aches for what it can�t have, the unsee...

How to Jumpstart the Economy

Friday, August 10 11:12 pm

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher While the business cycle has ordinary ups and downs, structural economic crises like the one we�re in are, Richard Florida would say, characterized by the demise of a particular economy. And with the right mix of policy and strategic investment, such crises can spur new eras of prolonged prosperity. Florida, the well-known author of Rise of the Creative Clas...

Are We Stuck in a Permanent War?

Wednesday, August 9 11:22 pm

Presidents may come and go, but national security stays the same, according to Andrew Bacevich, a former U.S. Army colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University. "I have become increasingly skeptical," Bacevich said, "about the tendency toward overmilitarization." Continuing the study he began in his previous two books, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich argues...

by Carrie A. Purcell

Wednesday, August 9 12:16 am

786.7: Abnormal Chest Sounds I have thumped upon thine chest but the treasure within long left it you carried Aztec gold and a monkey you carried mildewy maps and your mother�s castoff blankets you remain true to form but empty let�s let down a lead plumb line to scrape up bits off your bottom see how far down you go, sailor, stowing songs yard arm under listen to your fathoms find your level of pollution your old ships� ribs rotting in dangerous harbors h...

American Dreams

Wednesday, August 9 12:16 am

American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 by H.W. Brands �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher H.W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, charges through sixty-plus years of political, cultural, social, and economic history in this relatively brief yet very broad survey of post-war America; think Billy Joel�s �We Didn�t Start the Fire� as a narrative history. As the title would imply, Brands traces the evolution of dreams from the wake of World War II � when Am...

The Future of the Wild Ocean

Saturday, August 5 11:07 pm

Paul Greenberg cast his first fishing line before he got to first grade. The author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, moving from cottage to cottage on various estates in the wealthy town. �I grew up kind of poor, sort of a �Slums of Beverly Hills� story,� he said. And though his mom� encouraged him to share her interest in birding, Greenberg said, �What got me going, to her chagrin, was going out and catching and eating fish.� While writing Fo...

What is the Muslim Brotherhood?

Saturday, August 5 12:35 am

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement Edited by Barry Rubin �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Barry Rubin is prolific. He is the author of 25 books and editor of 30 more on the Middle East, and he edits the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Rubin demonstrates a sense of urgency in his desire to educate, which might explain the varied tone of the collection he's edited. He introduces The Muslim Brotherhood this way: "The Muslim Brotherho...

Dinosaur

Saturday, August 5 12:35 am

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle I can feel the sadness of the large head that floats in the museum like a planet the metronome of feet shuffling past a little sun powdering the lifted dust ��and it�s haloed Weeks, ��years, ��knees Red-raw in the dug dirt A scientist dug you free and spelt you out for your new skin Now the dinosaur contains what we imagined it could A life that�s visible we can reconstruct And all these people shuffling past Faith o...

A Writer's Life, Defined and Ended by War

Thursday, August 3 11:39 pm

The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942 by Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Lienhardt �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib The novelist Irene Nemirovsky�did not merely live through the early 20th century. Her life was a consequence of its cataclysms. Growing up in Ukraine in a privileged family, she came of age as an exile in France because of the Russian Revolution. Driven out of France after the German invasion, she died at Auschwitz in 1942. Nemirovsky�s incomplete novel series Suite Fran�ais...

The Living Constitution

Wednesday, August 2 11:30 pm

Elena Kagan, like all the other recent nominees to the Supreme Court bench, has had to contend with questions about how strictly she'd stick to the Constitution. As David A. Strauss explained, many people seem to think that the Constitution should be interpreted rigidly � sticking as closely as possible to the framers' intent � while others think it should be completely flexible. "It bothered me that a lot of people, including pretty sophisticated people, seemed to think that, in interpretin...

Koolhaas, Strasberg, Zaza

Tuesday, August 1 10:17 pm

Monday The Last Hero: Howard Bryant discusses baseball player Henry Aaron. Tuesday Koolhaas Houselife: A documentary about an architectural icon, screening at the Hammer. Poetry at the Beach: Three poets read at the Annenberg Community Beach House. Lee Ritenour: The jazz guitarist speaks at the Grammy Museum. Wednesday The Lee Strasberg Notes: Anna and David Strasberg talk about the legendary acting coach. Zaza: The Gloria Swanson classic screens at Cinefamily. Thursday ...

Who is your river? Who is your kitchen window?

Tuesday, August 1 10:17 pm

by Amorak Huey She asks almost everyone: her daughters, the man she�s having an e-mail love affair with, her oncologist, her mother, the girl who sells her latt�. They came to her when a man leaned over a somber desk. Any questions? She doesn�t ask her husband. He wouldn�t see the value. Or he would and want to know her answers. Which would be worse? Almost everyone says mother for kitchen window, or wife. Rivers are children or lovers. Some best friends. Rarely spouses. ...

Is Inequality What Ails Us?

Tuesday, August 1 10:17 pm

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett�s research shows that rich countries with high levels of internal wealth inequality have greater incidences of social problems than rich countries in which wealth is distributed more evenly.� Their explanation? That inequality within countries causes social problems.� That is, everything from obesity to lower life expectanc...

How to Live Well, and Frugally

Monday, July 29 11:38 pm

The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better by Chris Farrell �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel Chris Farrell doesn�t write about numbers. He writes about living a good life in a decidedly retro way � The New Frugality is a redux of the old frugality.�The New Frugality means accepting the wisdom of always managing our finances with a �margin of safety,�� as he puts it. �Our love affair with consumer debt is over,� Farrell writes, and we have the sub-prime mortgage cri...

Second Thoughts

Monday, July 29 10:23 am

by Ginny Wiehardt I would like to ask that everyone from �94 to �98 retire their memories of me. Like the time I ran off to become a snake lady in the circus and wound up shearing sheep in fishnet hose and a leotard. I never got the hang of success, so I must get the trick of living well. Does grace come of forgiveness, or the other way around? Fortune tellers have lost their appeal: the important questions swat flies in their sleep. The only safe bet is that we�ll get th...

A World Without Nuclear Weapons?

Sunday, July 28 11:34 pm

As "Countdown to Zero" producer Lawrence Bender discovered, making a movie about nuclear weapons isn't exactly easy. Most people don't think about them, and those who do don't necessarily want to talk, Bender explained. Still, Bender and director Lucy Walker secured commentary from an impressive catalog of world leaders, some of whom had to be booked over a year in advance -- from former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to former British Prime M...

Telling Dangerous Stories

Saturday, July 27 11:15 pm

Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban by Jere Van Dyk �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Last year was a banner one for high-profile American journalists arrested abroad. Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were held in North Korea for almost five months. Roxana Saberi spent just over four months in Iranian prisons. Their stories of trying to report from hostile countries were captivating and challenging. Were they courageous or reckless? Was their imprisonment a mark of aggression or ...

Are We Safe from Nukes?

Friday, July 26 11:12 pm

Nuclear weapons once preoccupied all Americans. During the Cold War, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union amassed arsenals, aimed them at each other, and held the world in a delicate balance appropriately abbreviated as MAD, global leaders realized the need to control nuclear weaponry even as they sought to attain or expand their capability. Today, more countries are members of the nuclear club, and more non-state actors are trying to join, but awareness about the danger of nuclear weapons seems...

What Civilization Has Cost Us

Thursday, July 25 10:34 pm

Spencer Wells, a geneticist and anthropologist, had studied the genetics of indigenous human populations for years when, after working on the PBS documentary about the Y chromosome, �The Journey of Man,� he found a home at National Geographic. �They said, �This is fascinating stuff. Now that you�re done with the film, what would you like to do next?� It�s a great question to be asked,� said Wells, who is now the �Explorer-in-Residence� for the magazine. His work took him around the world and...

Keeping Course

Thursday, July 25 10:27 pm

by Lena Firestone Here, pelagic particles bop off a bow and ignite within our wake. A cap-rail cradles knees and legs sling down with toes aiming to part the gleam. Conclusions rendered on midnight watch, without an encyclopedia, are wrong: Their light is not the moon reflected, bluing as the white of it bends and breaks on crest or trough. Each is an interior, personal phenomenon. They light in chorus from some somewhere within. Holding vigil: each, its own candle. ...

Is Conservatism Over?

Sunday, July 21 11:42 pm

The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History by David Farber �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher David Farber argues that modern American conservatism is a �disciplinary order generated by hostility to market restraints and fueled by religious faith, devotion to social order, and an individualized conception of political liberty.� The movement�s high point, by Farber�s count, was the election of Ronald Reagan. And then it came crashing down, felled by a �zealous faith ...

Hostage Nation

Saturday, July 20 11:38 pm

Hostage Nation: Colombia's Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs by Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge Enrique Botero �Reviewed by Angilee Shah When three American contractors were taken hostage after their plane crashed in the jungles of Colombia in 2003, Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes were positioned well to tell their stories. The duo had just finished a film about the kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. But the authors write in the prologue that there ...

How Nukes Got Loose

Thursday, July 19 11:10 pm

Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies by David Albright �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher After the major powers acquired nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War, the expected proliferation around the world didn�t happen. One big reason is that building nuclear weapons from scratch isn�t easy. The technology is exceedingly complex, the price tag high. But the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) deserves some credit too. In formally recognizing the ...

So Galactic

Thursday, July 19 12:06 am

by Aaron Belz My new band name the Macronauts really captures the largeness of what it�s like to be in Los Angeles where often it feels ( such as at the Edendale on Saturday) as if you are very floating the night full of night also captures the glamour not grocery store check out line but real glitz you can taste taste taste God bless me for now I have dyed pink hair and I am ready Lord I have crapped up Vans a studded thunder belt I am the light of the light ...

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

Thursday, July 19 12:06 am

Imtiaz Gul, author of The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier, has been a reporter for 25 years, covering the eponymous region on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. �We had a sort of romance with these areas,� Gul said. �They excited me, not as barren, rugged terrain, but because of the people there.� Below, Gul chats with Swati Pandey about the history of the tribal areas, how militants infiltrated the region and the rest of Pakistan, and what the U.S. can do to help...

Duke Helfand

Monday, July 16 3:31 pm

Duke Helfand has worked as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times for 17 years. He currently covers the financial side of health care, including the effect of the nation�s new health care law on insurers, hospitals, doctors and consumers. Before moderating a panel on health reform�s implications for California, he took our Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. With my kids at home, every Saturday, without a doubt. Q. What do you ...

Marian Mulkey

Monday, July 16 3:26 pm

Marian Mulkey is director of the California HealthCare Foundation's Health Reform and Public Programs Initiative, which is working to support the implementation of national health reform in California and advance the effectiveness of public coverage programs. Before chatting about health reform�s implications for California, she took our Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. At the grocery store, stocking up for the week. Q. What do you ...

Lucien Wulsin

Monday, July 16 3:23 pm

Lucien Wulsin is the project director of Insure the Uninsured Project and is working on approaches to expand coverage for uninsured working Californians. He is the author of "California at the Crossroads: Choices for Health Care Reform," a study on California�s options to redesign its health care system. Before chatting about health reform�s implications for California, he took our Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. Hiking up in the San...

John Arensmeyer

Monday, July 16 3:20 pm

John Arensmeyer is the founder and CEO of Small Business Majority, a California-based, national, nonpartisan organization. Prior to starting Small Business Majority, Arensmeyer was the founder and CEO of ACI Interactive, an award-winning international e-commerce company. Before chatting about health reform�s implications for Californians, he took our Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. Unfortunately, since health care reform passed, in th...

Jan Spencley

Monday, July 16 3:16 pm

Jan Spencley is the Executive Director of San Diegans for Healthcare Coverage. Jan is also a health care consultant with over 35 years in the industry, including 25 years at UCSD Healthcare.� Before chatting about health reform�s implications for California, she sat down for our Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. In metalsmithing class, or working. Q. What music have you listened to today? A. A m�lange of music in a restaurant, old...

What Health Reform Means for Californians

Sunday, July 15 11:25 pm

At 2,500 pages of legislation and even more pages of still unwritten regulation, health reform isn�t easy to comprehend. But we can be sure of two things, as Duke Helfand, a Los Angeles Times health reporter, explained. �It has great potential to open access to care for millions of people,� he said. �But the criticism is it doesn�t do enough to tackle and address the underlying costs of that care.� At an event made possible by the California HealthCare Foundation and moderated by Helfa...

Salomón Huerta

Sunday, July 15 1:31 pm

Salom�n Huerta started painting for a practical reason. �There were three sisters born before me, and I was the first boy. But once my brother and my little sister came along, I realized I needed to do something to get attention,� Huerta said. Below, Huerta, whose work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial, the Gagosian Gallery, and LACMA, answers our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. I used to go to yoga but I hurt my wrist, so, ...

David Pagel

Sunday, July 15 1:26 pm

David Pagel, an art critic and associate professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University, grew up in Wisconsin before heading to California for college, and to the East Coast for graduate school. �But I beat a hasty retreat right back to California, because it�s such a fantastic place to be,� he said. Below, Pagel takes our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. At home playing with my kids. Q. What do you wis...

Salomón Huerta on Ego, Destruction, and Facebook

Saturday, July 14 11:22 pm

As David Pagel explained, in the 1990s, when much of art concerned identity, �Salom�n Huerta made a name for himself by getting rid of the self.� Huerta painted the backs of heads, life-sized bodies seen from behind, and masked wrestlers, exhibiting around the world and being featured at the Whitney Biennial. In an event co-presented with the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Huerta chatted with Pagel, an art critic, ...

Charles Bukowski Finds Home

Friday, July 13 11:58 pm

Charles Bukowski lived and wrote all over Los Angeles. He devoted a short piece, a June 1974 installment of his "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column in the L.A. Free Press, to the hunt for home. He recalls his moves from the famed (and recently landmarked) DeLongre Avenue court, to a house with a girlfriend, to a "modern apartment," and finally to Hollywood and Western, where he felt "in love with the world again." Below, the newspaper column in full, pulled from a new collection featuring his ...

The Religious Lives of Scientists

Friday, July 13 12:05 am

Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund �Reviewed by Angilee Shah The 2005 lawsuit known as the Dover trial pit religion against science in the most virulent of ways. Parents challenged a school district�s requirement that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The judge�s ruling � that intelligent design is not science, but rather an intrusion of religion on a state institution � sparked criticism and praise...

Seagulls

Wednesday, July 11 10:54 pm

by Sarah Louise Green A gang of seagulls throw beaks into bread. He�s been coming here to feed them since she left. Crackers also sail through the air, announcing hope. The sun keeps on evenly over the marina. He sees no swirl of cloud approaching. Some birds nip at neck feathers, but everyone knows they don�t really mean it. They�ve got a reason. They�re small, or mottled, or mean-spirited, or have weak legs. She left her inconsiderate scent all over the house....

What Does Health Reform Mean for California's Economy?

Wednesday, July 11 10:25 pm

National health reform, a brick of a bill at over one thousand pages, took a year of bruising negotiations to become law. As the country waits for its measures to kick in � the promise of lower-cost care, broader coverage, and tighter insurer regulations � Z�calo asked five local health care advocates and doctors, what does health reform mean for the future of California's economy? Read their answers below, and join us on July 15 to learn more about what the law means for small businesses, i...

Our New Middle East Allies?

Saturday, July 8 11:44 pm

Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future by Stephen Kinzer �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Stephen Kinzer�s 2007 book Overthrow: America�s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq was fourteen chapters about fourteen instances in which the United States �was the decisive factor in the overthrow of a particular government.� It demonstrated that Kinzer has an uncanny ability to draw unexpected links between histories of many places. Reset is another accomplishment in that regard. It is a...

Logan Kock

Saturday, July 8 11:34 am

Logan Kock is the vice president of Strategic Purchasing and Responsible Sourcing for Santa Monica Seafood. He started his seafood career nearly 40 years ago as a waiter in Maine while working on his Masters in Biology. Kock spent eight years working on fishing boats before he began doing quality control for Red Lobster Restaurants. Below, he sits down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. I don�t have one that I�ve been trying to quit. ...

Mark Gold

Saturday, July 8 11:27 am

Mark Gold is President of the environmental group Heal the Bay, and was Executive Director from 1994 to 2006. Gold created Heal the Bay�s Beach Report Card, and has authored or co-authored numerous California coastal protection, water quality and environmental education bills. Below, Gold takes our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. Eating hamburgers. Aren�t you going to ask how it went? I did it. Q. Who was your childhood hero? A. Jacques C...

Are We Running Out of Seafood?

Saturday, July 8 12:36 am

Even though it was 15 years ago, Jonathan Gold remembers an unnerving conversation with Campanile chef Mark Peel about fish: Peel predicted then that in 40 years, eating wild fish would be as odd as eating wild game. �Now, only 15 years later, it seems almost frighteningly close to being true,� said Gold to the full house at the Skirball Cultural Center. Gold joined his brother and Heal the Bay President Mark Gold, Santa Monica Seafood�s Logan Kock, and Providence chef Michael Cimarust...

Work equals force times distance

Friday, July 7 11:56 pm

by Brian Clements when you walk up the stairs and open the door to your office, switch on the light and the heat, and pull back your chair, or work equals force times displacement times the cosine of the angle of your body�s misdirection when your Honda bounces off the side of a bus, or when a bus takes out a speed limit sign (since work is the transfer of energy, as when I transfer energy from my body through my Ping G10 to a ball likely to fly awry), which is goo...

Michael Maltzan

Friday, July 7 1:57 pm

Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan grew up on Long Island in Levittown, the prototypical suburb. �It was an incredible place to be a kid,� he said. Today, Maltzan is design principal of Michael Maltzan Architecture, which has been commissioned to design a wide range of projects from the Skid Row Housing Trust�s New Carver Apartments to the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory building. Below, Maltzan answers our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What was the last habit you tried to kick? A. ...

Frances Anderton

Friday, July 7 1:36 pm

Frances Anderton is the host of DnA: Design and Architecture, aired monthly on 89.9 KCRW and KCRW.com. She is producer of KCRW's national and local current affairs shows, To The Point, and Which Way, LA?, both hosted by Warren Olney. Anderton is also an L.A. Editor for Dwell Magazine and a contributor to Huffington Post. Before interviewing architect Michael Maltzan for Z�calo, Anderton sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Biting ...

Can Architects Change the World?

Friday, July 7 12:31 am

As the economy puts the skids on McMansions, Dubai towers, and all the projects that might give architects a bad name, Frances Anderton thought it time to correct some misconceptions. �Architects have strong egos, but they also have strong ideals,� said Anderton, host of KCRW�s DnA: Design and Architecture. In an event co-sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Anderton talked with an architect well kno...

How Can We Repair California?

Wednesday, July 5 11:22 pm

Joe Mathews, a fourth-generation Californian and frequent Z�calo moderator, joined forces with his fellow New America Foundation scholar Mark Paul to write California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It. �We�re colleagues, but we�re very different people. We�re from different ends of the state. He�s a baby boomer and I�m not. He has worked in government and politics, and I would never do that in a million years. He�s definitely a liberal, I�m not,� Mathews said. ...

Only Wet Sand

Wednesday, July 5 11:19 pm

by Stuart Greenhouse If only wet sand could be used, and only under the wrack-line is there wet sand, well, there�s your problem. Too little to carry too much up to the two blankets laid together, too big not to feel the problem in your bones. Change is bad, you poor thing, you decided so long ago you can�t remember ever feeling any different, and change is coming, so you feel for your nascent castle as if it were your home. How to save it? There�s a line two thousand miles long...

Why Rumors Matter

Sunday, July 2 12:04 am

Gary Fine thinks rumors deserve a better reputation. �The people who spread them shouldn�t be insulted or denigrated,� he said. �We all spread rumors of various kinds, and the rumors we spread tell us what we believe, what we feel we can�t talk about directly.� Fine began studying rumors at a crucial time, in the 1960s, when gossip abounded about the Kennedy assassination and race riots. He continued studying rumor and race in his book Whispers on the Color Line, discovering that gossip cont...

What is the Cruelest Food You've Ever Eaten?

Monday, June 30 11:23 pm

Our strong appetites for every fish from tuna and salmon to orange roughy and monkfish are upsetting ocean ecosystems and polluting the seas, as Jonathan Gold discussed at a Z�calo event. We asked five food lovers -- Kogi Chef Roy Choi, photographer Charlie Grosso, Teenage Glutster Javier Cabral, Eater LA's Kat Odell, and Artbites' Maite Gomez-Rej�n -- to tell us: What is the cruelest food you've ever eaten? Read their answers below. What's so cruel about killing a goat? Whale meat i...

The Lark

Monday, June 30 11:20 pm

by Timothy E. Bartel Two unasked ornaments�we receive them Christmas morning from our father: A cardinal, crimson for my Brother, and for me a lark: Wire feet to perch on branches, Golden faced, brown-striped, flanked in pink. I�ve looked for such larks but never Seen any so colored, so still. And now you may know ...

Does Europe Work?

Saturday, June 29 11:38 pm

Europe's Promise by Steven Hill �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher The Europe Steven Hill describes in Europe�s Promise sounds like a terrific place, sort of like a continent-sized Lake Wobegon where everything is done better than in the United States. He argues that Europe is not a sclerotic welfare state, as many Americans mistakenly assume. Instead, Hill says, Europe�s model of social capitalism harnesses the power of dynamic economic growth to provide a broad and deep social safety net th...

Should Non-Profits Act Like Corporations?

Saturday, June 29 12:00 am

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit sector, with big or small organizations, has likely felt pressure to think about markets and quantify outcomes in a corporate style. Michael Edwards' Small Change does much to explain and challenge this kind of corporatization of the nonprofit world. Now a distinguished senior fellow at the progressive New York City think tank Demos, Edwards is a relie...

The Vital Function of Constant Narrative

Thursday, June 27 11:26 pm

by Marlys West If the world is but a place of language, at last I know wherefore I talk too much. To make a place for myself, to create out of every ten sentences a bed to lie in, a chair for sitting; and of the next ten sentences, even little glitches like glitches like like, for example, strong proof the machine is not running down to dead. There is a sputtering to life, a stuttering, thus I speak in the rambling monologues reserved for small children who know their mother is ...

Zócalo's Summer Reading

Thursday, June 27 11:14 pm

If you're looking to read something hard-backed and heavy at the beach this year, Z�calo has selected the non-fiction books that piqued our interest and that we plan to haul to the shore over the next few months. Below, our contributors' 15 recommended titles for nerdy summer reading. Andrew J. Bacevich�s Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War: The former U.S. Army Colonel broadly critiques the country's foreign policy, including Barack Obama's expansion of the war in Afghanist...

Nicole LaPorte on DreamWorks

Monday, June 24 11:42 pm

A veteran Variety reporter, Nicole LaPorte wrote The Men Who Would Be King at the risk of never lunching � or breakfasting or dining � in this town again. Her book catalogs in precise detail � from boardroom blow-ups to red carpet premieres � the rise and fall of DreamWorks studios, the brainchild of Hollywood's biggest moguls since the golden age of the studio system. "There was money, it was the 90s, Clinton was in office," LaPorte said. "The movie business is always a risky� business, but...

Meditation on Rain

Monday, June 24 12:06 am

by Justin Rigamonti I�ve decided to remind myself that I�m going to die. It seems appropriate given the fact I�m turning thirty this year and my life still shows of continuity. Like something that can end. Besides, it�s been raining all morning, silver fits that fall for twenty minutes then blow away completely, and isn�t that a little morbid? Light falls between. Last night at dinner, three friends spoke of consciousness over dumplings and I kept silent, imagining a thin wire ...

Is Guilt Bad for Us?

Monday, June 24 12:06 am

The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism by Pascal Bruckner (Translated by Steven Rendall) �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel Each of us in the West may well have a reason to carry around a guilty conscience, considering our history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. But are we taking this guilt too far? Pascal Bruckner thinks so. The Tyranny of Guilt examines how the Western guilt complex may in fact be a major hurdle in fighting today�s atrocities. Bruckner, a prize-winning F...

William Dalrymple

Sunday, June 23 11:40 am

William Dalrymple is the author of several prize-winning travel books and histories. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was 22. Dalrymple is also author of The Age of Kali, White Mughals, and City of Djinns. He lives on a farm outside Delhi with his wife and three children. Before he delivered a talk on his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, he sat down for our Green Room Q&A. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. I�m...

Searching for the Sacred in Modern India

Saturday, June 22 11:26 pm

When he set out to write Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India 18 months ago, William Dalrymple hoped to find a Bengali man legendary for his skull collection. �Being a latent Orientalist, this sounded like very promising material,� Dalrymple said to the crowd at the Hammer Museum. Dalrymple found the skulls and their keeper, Tapan Goswami, who fed the skulls rum, whiskey and lentils, painted them red to stop them from molding in the monsoon, and was initially open chatti...

Peter Beinart

Saturday, June 22 1:16 pm

Peter Beinart is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and a Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast. He is author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals � And Only Liberals � Can Win the War on Terror and most recently of The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. Before he took the stage to talk about the limits of American power, he sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Eating chips really late at night whi...

Benjamin Schwarz

Saturday, June 22 1:04 pm

Benjamin Schwarz is literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic. Born in New York City and raised around the country, Schwarz has written for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and The Nation. Before he interviewed Peter Beinart about the limits of American power, Schwarz sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. ...

The Limits of American Power

Friday, June 21 11:36 pm

After transforming from an advocate of the Iraq war to an opponent, Peter Beinart knew he had to make sense of the ideas �that led me to this pretty massive mistake.� �I couldn�t really write about myself,� he said to the full house at The Actors' Gang, �because as my wife told me, I�m not that interesting a character.� Instead, Beinart, a New America Foundation fellow and journalist, wrote The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris � a study of how Americans have been seduced b...

Is American Foreign Policy Too Ambitious?

Thursday, June 20 11:14 pm

In The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, Peter Beinart argues that an overestimation of power has led the U.S. into three wars. We asked four scholars of foreign policy -- Princeton's Julian Zelizer, UCLA's Kal Raustiala, American University's David Vine and Temple University's Richard Immerman -- for their responses to a question sparked by Beinart's argument: Is American foreign policy too ambitious? Read their distinct takes below. Yes, we're too ambitious. American for...

Two perfect dandelions

Thursday, June 20 10:32 pm

by Laton Carter Two perfect dandelions hover stemless above the grass. The leopard is in repose, and the squirrel, upright on its haunches, offers to share its three acorns with the zebra. In bisected cutaway, the tree is hollow. From its exterior some type of evergreen, but the inner walls glow mahogany red. Here the bird has spun itself into a powdery ball, its eggs out of sight in a straw cup. Because it is the one that presides, the lion is in motion, no look of serenity from its patrol. ...

William Dalrymple on Divinity in India

Sunday, June 17 11:34 pm

In Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple profiles the devotees of obscure and exacting religious traditions, who embody but also struggle with India's high-speed modernization. He captures the mute sadness of a Jain nun who watches her closest friend ritually starve herself to death, the faithful mind of an illiterate goatherd who can recite from memory an ancient 200,000-verse epic poem, and the prison warden who, for two months of each year, is worshiped as...

Mechanical Failure

Sunday, June 17 12:04 am

by Carrie Shipers What cars could make men do: bleed, curse, throw wrenches.� Grin, swagger, clap each other�s backs.� Women worried about money, what to fix for meals, what might be broken and how they�d know.� Men broke, then fixed with hands like my father�s, brother�s� grease ground under the skin, fingernails flat and square.� I wanted their hands, wanted to say piston, crankshaft, manifold and mean it like a man, wash to the elbow with Lava, GoJo, forget to rinse...

The Real Anne Boleyn?

Sunday, June 17 12:01 am

Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions by G. W. Bernard �Reviewed by Ralph Walter Anne Boleyn is a woman of legends. She is the six-finger seductress that ruined Henry�s marriage to the �good queen� Catherine of Catholic myth. She is the French-trained (a pejorative in Tudor England) courtesan that destroyed the arch-Machiavellian Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.� She is the protestant martyr that mothered England�s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I.� She is the questionably fertile harpy that Thomas Crom...

Jonathan Alter

Saturday, June 16 2:34 pm

Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, was born and raised in Chicago, �six blocks from Wrigley Field.� His political roots in the city go back to his mom, �the first woman ever elected to public office in Cook County, in 1972,� Alter said. Below, Alter, who has worked spent 27 years covering politics for Newsweek, tells us more about himself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Going to the refrigerator too often to look for something to eat bet...

How to Grade Barack Obama's First Year

Friday, June 15 11:26 pm

With his years of experience covering the White House, Jonathan Alter understands intimately the shortcomings of the instant news cycle. �You need to wait a few weeks or months before people will talk,� he told the full house at the RAND Corporation. Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, revealed what he learned writing the �second draft� of history: the inside story on Obama�s successes, failures, and his even and sometimes alienating temperament. Healthcare, not...

Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome

Thursday, June 14 11:54 pm

Peter Beinart argues in The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris that Iraq is far from the first war America has launched on faulty reasoning. Beinart, an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, says that Americans have suffered from hubris for over a century, miscalculating the extent of our power, crafting elaborate theories about our country's role in the world, imagining success � the spread of American interests and ideals � t...

Matt Labash on Fringe Politics

Wednesday, June 13 11:03 pm

Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys by Matt Labash �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Matt Labash writes for the right-leaning Weekly Standard, but this first book-length collection of his work for the most part transcends the spectrum of ordinary politics. The majority of the pieces in Fly Fishing with Darth Vader are about fringe political figures, though one certain former vice president makes the cut � and the...

Wilbert Rideau

Monday, June 11 11:53 am

Wilbert Rideau spent 44 years in Louisiana�s infamous Angola penitentiary. While there, he served for 25 years as editor of The Angolite, the nation�s only uncensored prisoner-produced publication. He is author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. Below, Rideau tells us a bit more about himself. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. Enjoying nature. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. Make it 11 a...

Reforming Prisons from the Inside

Sunday, June 10 11:02 pm

Like most speakers, Wilbert Rideau began by telling the audience at the Skirball Cultural Center that he was glad to be there. But, Rideau, who spent 44 years in Louisiana State Pententiary, added, �No one has ever meant it more than I do.� Rideau, author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, talked about his time running the country�s only uncensored prisoner-run publication, and explained why lifting censorship is the single most important prison reform. ...

Jonathan Alter on Obama's Temperament

Sunday, June 10 1:35 am

Jonathan Alter, a senior editor at Newsweek and a native of Chicago, used his unmatched access to President Barack Obama to write The Promise: President Obama, Year One. Compiling the sometimes cutting, occasionally obscene anecdotes and asides of Obama's inner circle, Alter reveals anew the much-watched administration. Below, Alter, who visits Z�calo on June 15, analyzes Obama's temperament, and how the president might benefit from adapting some of the style of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald...

Michael Hiltzik

Friday, June 9 1:08 pm

Michael Hiltzik, a longtime reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, had been writing about water issues when he started considering a book about the Hoover Dam. But writing Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century also had a practical appeal for Hiltzik, whose last book examined more recent history. �I had interviewed 300 people and felt that they were looking over my shoulder as I wrote,� he said. �I thought it would be an interesting change to write a book of h...

How the Hoover Dam Made America

Thursday, June 8 11:12 pm

The Hoover Dam wasn�t always known as the Hoover Dam. As Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, explained, the battle to name the dam spanned 20 years and several presidential administrations. Options included Boulder Canyon Dam or simply Boulder Dam, even though the dam was 20 miles downstream in Black Canyon. In 1947, a Republican-majority Congress voted to put Hoover�s name back on the Dam, prompting so much controversy that one frustrat...

A Mosque in Munich

Wednesday, June 7 11:44 pm

A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West by Ian Johnson �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Reading nonfiction is not usually an adventure the way reading fiction can be. It is more often an intellectual exercise that rarely enters the realm of imagination. A Mosque in Munich does both. It starts with a cast of characters, is scaffolded by a translation of Goethe�s �Ginko Biloba�, and takes off on a winding narrative stemming from the author�s curio...

Juliet Schor on Plenitude

Tuesday, June 6 11:08 pm

Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, has long studied American excess, from how much we work (in her book The Overworked American) to how much we spend (The Overspent American) to how much we shop (Born to Buy). Her latest book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, takes up moderating both economic and ecological excesses by using the eponymous new concept of sustainability. �Plenitude, this way of living, it�s a new model,� she said. �It�s an emerging trend that...

Sagittal

Tuesday, June 6 10:59 pm

by Shiaw-Tian Liaw Eight bones, white, bowled and jig-sawed, hold the brain. Fourteen keep the face from falling. The heart pumps its vegetal stem neck up and grows a brain, popped eyes, a sagittal tongue. Downwards too, into knobbed joints, out into appendages I don�t notice until they�re hurting: a small toe I picked too much nail off and I�m a little unbalanced, or a paper-cut finger and everything I touch, I touch a tear, more irreparable year by slower year. It was a ...

How Do We Make Memories?

Sunday, June 4 12:14 am

101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory by Terry McDermott �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib Under Terry McDermott�s watchful, and sometimes worshipful eye, his subject � UC Irvine neuroscientist Gary Lynch � emerges as a charming egomaniac and autodidact, an engrossing character. But more importantly, 101 Theory Drive offers an education in how science happens � the almost exploitative systems of work, the incestuously small and competitive community of scientists, the persona...

Wilbert Rideau on Solitary Confinement

Saturday, June 3 12:09 am

Wilbert Rideau spent 44 years in one of the country�s most infamous prisons, Louisiana�s Angola penitentiary. While in prison, he pursued reform, co-producing a documentary, �Tossing Away the Keys,� for NPR�s All Things Considered, and co-directing the Academy Award�nominated film �The Farm: Angola, USA�. In the excerpt from his book, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, Rideau, who visits Z�calo on June 10, recalls spending time in solitary confinement. It�s l...

How P.T. Barnum Got His Start

Friday, June 2 12:26 am

On June 2, 1835, P. T. Barnum and a troupe of performers began their first tour in the United States, though this initial stint was a far cry from the grand, coordinated spectacles of today's circus shows. Below, in his P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man, A. H. Saxon describes Barnum's start in showmanship with the discovery of a purportedly 161-year-old woman named Joice Heth. "If being made for a thing is a divine call to that thing," Barnum's last pastor in Bridgeport, the Reverend Lew...

Richard Immerman on American Empire

Saturday, May 31 11:30 pm

Richard Immerman has studied American empire for decades � since college at Cornell, where he worked with the famed historian of American empire, Walter LaFeber. But the notion of American empire, Immerman said, �was a very contested concept at that point, and it still is.� Below, Immerman, author of Empire For Liberty: A History of American Imperialism From Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz, talks with Swati Pandey about what American empire is, who built it, and how Barack Obama is handl...

Can't Live Without

Monday, May 27 12:37 am

by Jonathan Farmer Liver, lungs, heart; blood and water, skin. You need enough warmth not to freeze in winter and the air has to be breathable, the water clean enough to drink� but only that; the merely bad can give more life for years. A modest amount of safety; failing that, a little bit of luck or a decision to accept humiliation, to accept injustice, knowing nothing you can do will make it stop. And sometimes, nothing does and no one is safe and the grief can cripple a...

Opening the Golden Gate

Monday, May 27 12:35 am

San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic on May 27, 1937. It was immediately praised for being the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its completion, but more importantly, the bridge came to be regarded as the definitive symbol of the nation's western frontier. Below, in a piece for Architect, Dan Halpern examines the origins and national significance of the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd come to San Francisco to work out whether the Golden Gate Bridge, na...

Confessions of a Lifelong China Watcher

Sunday, May 26 5:47 pm

China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom by Richard Baum �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Looking back on China�s dramatic recent history, from the devastation of the Great Leap Forward to today�s exuberant �socialism with Chinese characteristics,� is a fascinating exercise. China Watcher offers the rare opportunity to learn this history as author Richard Baum did � from the front row. China Watcher is a memoir and a contemporary history rolled into one. A professor of political science...

Kathay Feng

Sunday, May 26 2:11 pm

Kathay Feng is the Executive Director of California Common Cause, and author of Proposition 11 � California�s successful redistricting reform. Before chatting onstage about direct democracy in the state, Feng sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. Chocolate. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. Just finishing up breakfast with my husband and daughter. Q. What do you do to clear your...

Andreas Gross

Sunday, May 26 1:55 pm

Andreas Gross is a member of the Swiss Federal Parliament, and the Council of Europe�s Parliamentary Assembly, where he leads the Social Democrats. Gross is also an advocate for transnational direct democracy in Europe. He came to Z�calo to discuss Zurich�s political system. Below, he answers our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. To be able to have an influence on the way you live, to know that life isn't destiny. Q. Where wou...

Bruno Kaufmann

Sunday, May 26 1:40 pm

Bruno Kaufmann, a journalist and the director of the Initiative & Referendum Institute Europe, is a Swiss and Swedish citizen with voting rights in nine constituencies. He visited Z�calo to talk about direct democracy in Zurich and Los Angeles, and he told us a bit more about himself beforehand. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. To be at home. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday? A. Eating breakfast. Q. What do you do t...

George Kieffer

Sunday, May 26 1:32 pm

George Kieffer is a partner at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, where he oversees regulatory and government-related matters. Previously, he chaired the commission charged with rewriting the Los Angeles City Charter � the first full revision in 75 years. Kieffer visited Z�calo to compare direct democracy between Zurich and Los Angeles. Before he took the stage, he told us a little more about himself. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. Love. Q. ...

How Does Direct Democracy Work?

Sunday, May 26 12:17 am

Besides being dream destinations for immigrants and global centers of finance, Zurich and Los Angeles share the unusual distinction of being de facto capitols of the world�s leading laboratories of direct democracy. As journalist Joe Mathews explained, Switzerland and California use citizens� initiatives and referenda more often and with more force than anywhere else in the world. Although, he added, �Oregonians have some argument there.� In an event co-presented by the Huntington-USC Ins...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Saturday, May 25 3:19 pm

Carlos Ruiz Zaf�n is the author of six novels that have sold over 15 million copies worldwide, including The Shadow of the Wind, the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history after Don Quixote. His latest novel is The Angel�s Game. Before chatting about his life and work onstage, he sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. What is your favorite thing about Los Angeles? A. Its diversity � that there are people here from all over the world, all mixed together. Q. Wher...

Rick Kleffel

Saturday, May 25 3:18 pm

Rick Kleffel is a book reviewer and broadcaster for National Public Radio, whose work has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and other nationally syndicated programs.� He's written for The San Francisco Chronicle and the British Publication Interzone.� His weekly hour-long radio show of author interviews from NPR affiliate KUSP is called The Agony Column.� Below, Kleffel told us a bit more about himself before taking the stage to interview Carlos Ruiz Zaf�n...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón on Inspiration, Mystery, and Women

Friday, May 24 11:05 pm

Three-dimensional movies and multiplayer video games may be flashy, but, according to Rick Kleffel, one technology has them beat � the age-old mechanism of reading. Reading, he said, is �a primal force in which we the readers collaborate with the authors to create characters, adventures, empathy and memories not unlike those of our real lives.� Kleffel, who runs the book review site The Agony Column, visited Z�calo to chat with Carlos Ruiz Zaf�n, author of The Angel�s Game and The Shadow ...

Orange Trees in the Gardens of Pedro El Cruel

Thursday, May 23 11:36 pm

by Peter L. Atkinson for Matthew The cicadae, an ancient tribe, are said to have been the first men taught to sing. In rapture they forgot to eat and later did not notice they had died. It was their song that moved the grasses bending to the dance that raged on the courtyard tile where that woman drove her heels, drew up her hem and shook her skirt to its ragged ends�those tassels, a terror to living men. So too did violent rhythms sh...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game

Tuesday, May 21 1:04 am

Carlos Ruiz Zaf�n's latest novel, The Angel's Game, follows a struggling pulp fiction writer approached by a mysterious publisher with a suspiciously good book deal. Zaf�n, whose work has been translated into over 40 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, visits Z�calo on May 24 to talk about fiction in a global age. Below, an excerpt from The Angel's Game. A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never fo...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Prince of Mist

Tuesday, May 21 1:03 am

Carlos Ruiz Zaf�n's first novel, The Prince of Mist, was published in 1992 as a young adult book, along with his three subsequent novels. But, as Zaf�n, who visits Z�calo on May 24, writes in an introductory note to the book, "I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations." Below, an excerpt from The Prince of Mist. Max had once read in one of his father�s books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again a...

Isobel Coleman

Monday, May 20 11:12 am

Isobel Coleman, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, grew up in New York and London before heading to Princeton for college. After focusing on Asia for her doctorate and working in the private sector, Coleman returned to policy about 10 years ago. �The world was really very focused on understanding the Middle East better,� said Coleman, whose Paradise Beneath Her Feet: Women and Change in the Middle East contributed to that effort. Below, Coleman tells us more about herself. ...

How Women are Changing the Middle East

Saturday, May 19 11:51 pm

Isobel Coleman greeted the crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue with some regret. �I�ve actually spent more time in Riyadh and in Kabul than in Los Angeles in my lifetime,� the Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow said. �That�s a very poor trade-off.� But Coleman, author of Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, brought the lessons of her travels throughout the Middle East and Central Asia home. At an event co-sponsored by the UCLA Burkle Center for Internat...

Portrait of Patience Escalier

Saturday, May 19 10:51 pm

by Genevieve Leone We live many lifetimes in one. The red-hot iron of noon and the face of the old man, flat against it. We feel him with heavy brushstroke, hammering light. Shadows of old gold. We can�t become him and away. Color stops us, the thickness of it, the heat, everything that must be carried. One brown hand folded over another, elbows bent. We are born and progress toward stone. His lips are closed. To say is too large or small....

Three Thousand Years of Christianity

Friday, May 18 10:47 pm

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch �Reviewed by Ralph Walter On first glance Christianity doesn�t look entirely promising. It�s a companion book to a television series � so one expects lots of pictures. The subtitle � �The First Three Thousand Years � suggests that the last third of the book is a millenarian rant on the rapture. But Christianity is a tome of over one thousand pages of dense but highly readable text. It starts with two rich chapters ...

Why Women Matter in the Middle East

Friday, May 18 12:23 am

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Isobel Coleman traveled across the Middle East, Africa and Asia for her book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East. Touching down in conflicted, struggling cities around the globe, Coleman finds women working for reform, adapting feminism to their particular cultural and religious mores. In the excerpt below, Coleman, who visits Z�calo on May 19, reveals how Somali women kept Mogadishu fed during a brutal and ongoing...

Is Silence Possible?

Friday, May 18 12:22 am

Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence by George Michelsen Foy �Reviewed by Swati Pandey George Michelsen Foy�s search for silence starts in a burst of noise. Generally the wish of scolds and New-Agers, the very religious or the somewhat mad, silence captivates Foy after a particularly �thundering shrieking roaring� eruption of New York subway trains at the 79th street station. It makes sense for the study of a subject most often defined, as Foy puts it, �almost wholly as an...

Beth Bachmann reads 'Paternoster'

Thursday, May 17 12:57 am

Beth Bachmann, who teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University, won this year's Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her first collection of poems, Temper. Bachmann's poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and Antioch Review, among others. Below, she reads "Paternoster," from her collection. ...

Fifty Years of the Pill

Thursday, May 17 12:56 am

Elaine Tyler May has a professional and personal connection to the birth control pill. She�s a historian at the University of Minnesota who has long studied family and sexuality, particularly the intersection of private life and public policy. And her parents both helped bring the pill to being � her father was a clinical researcher who worked on the development of the pill, and her mother was a birth control activist. �The pill was a really obvious choice for me to take a look at, 50 years ...

Geoff Dyer

Monday, May 14 11:13 am

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, including most recently Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, for which he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel, and the GQ Writer of the Year Award. He is also author of several genre-defying titles, including But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Below, he answers our In The Green Room Q&A. Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturda...

How We Experience Art

Sunday, May 13 10:38 pm

Taking the stage at the auditorium at the Getty Center, Geoff Dyer joked, �I feel I should be playing the piano or something like that.� But the author of The Ongoing Moment and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, spoke on art and the experience of art through one particular work. And, he insisted, �It�s important that you don�t know what this talk is going to be about.� First landmarks Dyer began by recalling two landscapes from his youth. The first was at a park adj...

Ben Wildavsky

Sunday, May 13 12:05 pm

Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was education editor of U.S. News & World Report, where he was the top editor of America's Best Colleges and America's Best Graduate Schools. Below, Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race, tells us more about himself. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. Eating dessert. Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be ...

A New Vocabulary for Conflict

Saturday, May 12 11:27 pm

Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity by James H. Mittelman �Reviewed by Angilee Shah James H. Mittelman must be watching the crisis in Greece with keen interest. He is the author of Hyperconflict, a book that proposes to change the scale of our language concerning global business, power and conflict. �Hypercompetition� refers to the kind of business that uses the language of war to compete. �Chief executives even want to throw their own organizations off balance,� Mittelman ...

Raindrop on Paper Hat

Saturday, May 12 11:25 pm

by Paul Beilstein Out of the vapor, an ovaloid droplet, on this day or that, drops with four trillion gallons-worth or so all over the world. Slightly more than half of what falls evaporates back to the atmosphere. The rest soaks in. That I might become vapor near a cumulonimbus cloud, that I might disappear and stay that way forever is improbable. Today, while it rains, I�m wearing a folded-newspaper hat. It looks like a sailboat. The newspaper was getting we...

How Globalization is Changing Higher Ed

Friday, May 11 10:31 pm

When Ben Wildavsky spied monkeys, deer, and big banyan trees outside his hotel window in Southeast India, he assumed he was in a �sort of sleepy� place. But Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race, was near the campus of the elite Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, which accepts only two to three percent of its applicants and hosts recruiters from Google, McKinsey, and top universities around the world. There is, he said to the crowd at NPR West, �this intense competition that�s ...

Why the Amazon Matters

Thursday, May 10 11:30 pm

Nikolas Kozloff, author of three books on Latin America including his latest, No Rain in the Amazon: How South America's Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet, makes the case for paying closer attention to the region�s environmental issues, particularly the rainforest. �It�s not just an abstract environmental issue anymore � it�s of primary concern to us all,� he said. In fact, he noted, the landscape in the Amazon is changing so much that �you could swear as you�re going down this road t...

Dinah Lenney

Thursday, May 10 11:24 am

Dinah Lenney, author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir and a writing teacher at USC, was born in New York City and moved to Los Angeles 25 years ago. �It took me a while to get used to things,� she said. �But I think transplants are proprietary about L.A. We�re proud of it.� Below, Lenney, who played Nurse Shirley on �ER� for 15 years, tells us more about herself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Popcorn. Q. Who was your childhood hero? A. Rosalind Russell. ...

Helen redux

Tuesday, May 9 10:14 pm

by Sue Cronmiller It was good to be back in Laconia. Wind pitted cliffs, prickly pears, a few gnarled olive trees. Here she could be more connected to what mattered in the story. Nothing in Troy lent itself to writing. Too much plot. Far too much death and madness. Such pathos. She feared her life to be melodramatic by any standard. At home, she could be her own captive, holding up against Menelaus, who, in his darkness, wants from her a full account. He sees ...

Why We Love Houses

Tuesday, May 9 10:07 pm

To introduce Meghan Daum for the night, USC writing teacher Dinah Lenney quoted Nabokov: �Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective.� �I get to quote Nabokov,� she said to the full house at MOCA. �Nevermind that I stumbled on this quote on Facebook.� As Lenney described Daum�s work, �She always manages to speak to larger issues, to the stuff that matters to all of us� by telling her own stories. Daum joined Lenney to chat about her latest book, Life Would Be Perfect...

Physics at the Ends of the Earth

Saturday, May 6 11:35 pm

The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Anil Ananthaswamy Barring apples falling on heads, physics isn�t often made tangible. But Anil Ananthaswamy aims to bring that most obscure and fundamental branch of science down to Earth. Devoting each chapter to the far-flung site of a vanguard experiment, Ananthaswamy meets � not to mention bunks, eats, drives, hikes and suffers extreme cold with � the men and women working to understand why th...

Reexamining Cesar Chavez

Saturday, May 6 12:22 am

Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez�s Farm Worker Movement by Miriam Pawel �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel Written at a time when everyone knows what it means to construct a public image, Miriam Pawel�s Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez�s Farm Worker Movement revisits the story of an iconic movement with an even more iconic leader. But instead of a �Chavez and Goliath� story, Pawel shows us exactly how many people make up the �litt...

After The St. Francis Dam

Saturday, May 6 12:19 am

by Lisa P. Sutton Concrete mostly, fractured spans of handrails in their new rust, insistent brown rabbits.� Downstream from the floodwave, now someone�s house, green lawn, the sun thick with its own agenda. More rabbits.� Ghosts from here to the ocean though I know days aren�t made from holding back and watching bunnies.� To think his hand in hers means the rest of it, entire weeks unaware of animals burrowing in weeds or the sound of stone cracking.� Of course Mulholland bla...

Val Zavala

Friday, May 5 11:58 am

Val Zavala has been the anchor of SoCal Connected since its debut in 2008.� She has been at KCET since 1987, serving as anchor, reporter or executive producer for the long-running "Life & Times" as well as other news programs and specials. Over her career at KCET she has won 14 L.A. Area Emmys and eight Golden Mikes. Zavala, before moderating a panel on high-speed rail, told us a bit more about herself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. I just got my cholesterol chec...

Richard Katz

Friday, May 5 11:47 am

Richard Katz serves on the Governing Board of the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the California High Speed Rail Authority. Previously he served for 16 years in the California State Assembly, including ten years as Chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee. He authored the successful Proposition 111, a Transportation Blueprint that raised more money for mass transit and highways than any other effort in California�s history. He told us a little about himself before chatti...

Adrian Moore

Friday, May 5 11:35 am

Adrian Moore is vice president of research at the Reason Foundation, where he also directs the Galvin Project to End Congestion. He is co-author of the book Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit and Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive 21st Century.� Prior to joining Reason, Moore served 10 years in the Army on active duty and reserves. Before taking the stage to talk high-speed rail, Moore told us more about himself. Q. What i...

Gloria Ohland

Friday, May 5 11:23 am

Gloria Ohland is a communications and policy specialist. For the past dozen years, she served as vice president for communications at Reconnecting America and the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. She has published several books including Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the 21st Century. Below, before taking the stage to talk about whether rail has a future, she told us a bit more about herself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Too much food. Q. Who was...

Does Rail Have a Future?

Thursday, May 4 11:39 pm

At the Petersen Automotive Museum, sitting next to a sign that read �What were they thinking?� in a roomful of cars that flopped, Val Zavala thought it a fitting place to talk high-speed rail. �What were they thinking,� she said, �is what a lot of people are thinking when they hear what a high-speed rail project would cost.� That cost rings up to $42 billion, said Zavala, host of KCET SoCal Connected, a co-sponsor of the event. Zavala joined L.A. County Metropolitan Transit Authority Boar...

What is Global Higher Education?

Thursday, May 4 12:40 am

Globalization has transformed much of the world as we know it, and education is no exception. More students than ever before are studying outside their home countries, and schools are launching satellite campuses around the world. What happens when higher ed hits the marketplace, and we all become part of a "free trade in minds"? In the excerpt from The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World below, Ben Wildavsky, who visits�Z�calo on May 11, explains the changing w...

Why Does Contemporary Art Cost So Much?

Thursday, May 4 12:37 am

Don Thompson, a teacher of marketing and economics at York University in Toronto, started studying art auctions because he didn�t quite understand how they work. �My friends ask, �Why is this being sold, and why at these prices?� And I say, �I don�t know,�� he said. �Who determines the one-tenth of one percent of artists who get to earn money like that?� Thompson, author of The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, explained to Swati Pandey of Z�calo why art c...

John A. Pérez

Wednesday, May 3 10:59 am

John A. P�rez is the first openly gay Speaker of the California Assembly. Representing Maywood, Vernon, Huntington Park as well as the communities of Boyle Heights, Downtown Los Angeles, unincorporated East Los Angeles and parts of South Los Angeles, P�rez grew up in El Sereno and Highland Park and became active in the labor movement while in school at UC Berkeley. Below, the Speaker tells us more about himself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. I don�t know that I�ve had...

John A. Pérez on California's Future

Tuesday, May 2 11:14 pm

Politics had an intimate impact on John A. P�rez�s life from an early age. The newly elected Speaker of the California Assembly recalled two policies of the Reagan administration that changed his family�s life when he was a young teen. The first happened when his father, �a sheet metal worker by day and a cook by night,� was injured in an industrial accident and Reagan changed the definition of disability. �It took him one and a half years to reprove disability,� P�rez recalled. The se...

David Remnick on Barack Obama

Wednesday, April 30 12:49 am

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher As David Remnick�s new biography of Barack Obama shows, the big question of the 2008 campaign�whether America was �ready� for a black president�was answered even before it was asked. While Remnick still focuses on the soul-searching of that year, it seems on the evidence that a good number of Americans, and especially the national media, were practically craving Obama. Before zooming in on Oba...

Meghan Daum on House Hunting in the Bubble

Monday, April 29 12:31 am

Meghan Daum, an essayist, novelist, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, traces in her latest book her search for a place to call home. A suburban child, Daum explores how the search for perfect apartments and houses consumed her from New York City to Nebraska to Los Angeles. In this excerpt from Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House, Daum, who visits Z�calo on May 7, goes house-hunting in L.A. at the height of the real estate bubble. True scholarship requires obsession, base...

Joseph Menn

Sunday, April 28 11:42 am

Joseph Menn, author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, wasn�t keen on revealing where he was born. �It makes it easier for people to steal my identity,� he said, smiling. �I was born in the United States.� Menn began his over-20-year career as a journalist at a small-town paper covering cops, �which is how you used to start out in journalism before there were websites you could glom on to in a nice city,� he said. Below, The Financial ...

Will Cyber Crime Bring Down the Web?

Saturday, April 27 10:58 pm

When Joseph Menn said that the Internet � the system that lets computers talk to each other � will not collapse, a collective sigh of relief went through the audience at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. But, Menn said, the Internet, and particularly the sites that handle our sensitive financial information, are by no means safe. �If we�re talking about the Internet as we�re actually using it today, as a trusted medium for financial transactions and for doing busin...

The Real Cost of War

Friday, April 26 11:45 pm

War and the Health of Nations by Zaryab Iqbal �Reviewed by Angilee Shah The premise of War and the Health of Nations is not all that startling: War is bad for your health. But what Zaryab Iqbal offers is quantifiable evidence that there needs to be a shift in how we talk about war. The "cost of war" should take on new meaning. She emphasizes "human security" over national security and urges policy makers to look beyond economics and borders when designing their military programs: "...

Abraham Lowenthal

Friday, April 26 11:46 am

Abraham Lowenthal was born and raised in Massachusetts, and went to Harvard �and stayed for every degree I could think of.� After a stint in the Dominican Republic � when �Lyndon Johnson in his wisdom landed the marines and gave me a topic for my PhD thesis� � Lowenthal moved to California. �It was for a very simple reason,� the USC professor and author of Global California explained. �I fell in love with a wonderful woman.� Lowenthal tells us more about himself below. Q. What was the la...

Peter Richardson

Friday, April 26 11:28 am

Peter Richardson was born in Berkeley, California. The PoliPoint Press editor has lived in Texas and New York, but couldn�t resist coming home. �I did two ten-year tours outside California,� he said. �I�m really glad to be back. Every time I come back I feel the same way.� Richardson sat down for our Green Room Q&A before talking about whether California should become its own country. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. Fresca. That's a tough one. Q. Who was your chil...

Mark Kurlansky on Baseball in the Caribbean

Thursday, April 25 9:52 pm

Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Cod and Salt, spent several years covering the Caribbean for the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s, when he first came to the town to which he devotes his latest book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris. �If you spend any time there, you know baseball is there. You see it everywhere,� he said. Below, he chats with Swati Pandey of Z�calo about how baseball arrived on the island along with sugar cane, how Dominic...

Darry A. Sragow

Tuesday, April 23 4:34 pm

Darry Sragow, a leading political campaign consultant and a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, has been bicoastal from birth until today. But Sragow, a fifth-generation Californian on his mom�s side, affirmed, �Home is Los Angeles.� Below, Sragow, who joined Z�calo for a panel on whether California should be its own country, tells us more about himself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Chocolate. Q. Who was your childhood hero? A. Willie Mays. Q. ...

David Dayen

Tuesday, April 23 3:33 pm

David Dayen, a blogger at Calitics and Hullaballoo, was born in Philadelphia and moved to California in 1998. Before taking the stage at the Autry National Center to chat about whether California should be its own country, Dayen told us a bit more about himself. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. Trying to get through the mass of media that used to come into my house, newspapers, magazines, stacks and stacks and stacks. I finally said I�m ending my subscriptions. Q. Who ...

Should California Be its own Country?

Monday, April 22 11:13 pm

California has a lot going for it. As New America Foundation senior fellow Joe Mathews explained, California boasts 17 of the top 30 American tech companies � including Google and Facebook � receives three times as many patents as the next most inventive state, hosts five of the country�s top 10 universities by research funding, and is larger in size and population and economy than many of the world�s countries. And by the latest estimate, California only gets about 80 cents for every dollar...

The New York World's Fair

Sunday, April 21 11:49 pm

More than 100 years after the first World�s Fair in 1851, the 1964/1965 New York World�s Fair opened on April 22, 1964. Like its predecessors, the fair, masterminded by planner Robert Moses, showed off the latest technological innovations. And appropriately for its time, the fair boosted for world peace and cross-cultural acceptance, debuting none other than Disneyland�s �It�s a Small World� attraction. But the fair�s ambitions may have been too high. Below, from an article in American Herit...

What Everyone Needs to Know about China and Burma

Sunday, April 21 11:49 pm

China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know by David I. Steinberg �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Think of the What Everyone Needs to Know series as Lonely Planet for the politically inclined � rich context for the diplomat, the observant traveler, or the news junkie. The strength of this series, judged by these two titles, is the authors� ability to capture nuance while committing themselves to brevity. ...

The New Cyber Crime Lords

Sunday, April 21 2:20 am

Joseph Menn's Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet travels through the underworld of cybercrime and finds � beyond the pseudonymous hackers, mob kingpins, and devoted investigators �� state police forces that look the other way, dangerous cracks in the global system of online commerce, and the first signs of major geopolitical conflict. Below, Menn, Financial Times Technology Correspondent, adapts from his book the story of two investigators...

Steven Solomon

Saturday, April 20 2:06 pm

Steven Solomon, before he wrote Water, was author of The Confidence Game, which explained how unelected central bankers make international economic policy. What unites his two subjects? �Liquidity,� he joked. �Which isn�t much.� Below, Solomon tells us a bit about himself. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. I indulge most of the habits that I have. But I have tried to kick the one I picked up in Italy, which is arriving in meetings 10 minutes after the meeting was supposed ...

Why Water is the New Oil

Thursday, April 19 11:22 pm

Steven Solomon had a simple answer to why water beats oil for world�s most precious resource. �You can�t drink oil, and you can�t grow food with it,� he said to the standing-room-only crowd at the RAND Corporation. Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, explained how intrinsic water is to the way we live � from what we wear to the cars we drive and the computers we use � and how its scarcity drives economic, environmental, and political conflic...

Simon Johnson

Thursday, April 19 11:03 am

Simon Johnson came to MIT for grad school and never left. A professor of entrepreneurship, Johnson initially thought that he would study history, math, or physics. �Somebody told me, and I internalized, that there is no money in history,� he said. �I learned that economics has a combination of historical narrative, math, and physics. I was well advised.� Below, Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers, tells us more about himself. Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure? A. ...

Dog Walking at Night in a New Neighborhood

Thursday, April 19 10:57 am

by Elisa Pulido I open the door, only to discover this place, too, gets dark at night. And, as I have not yet made the acquaintance of the street�s bushes, and since they balloon blackly either side of the road like rumors, I walk Max down the center of the street.� Across town, church bells peal from the cathedral of San Juan, and just as I decide to brave the sidewalk through the valley of shadows, a fire truck, siren-less, but with lights flashing, rolls up the street, which ca...

Iran Since Khomeini

Wednesday, April 18 11:08 pm

After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors by Said Amir Arjomand �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib �Do not allow our enemies to say that a bunch of mullahs sat there and wrote a constitution to justify their own rule. For God�s sake, don�t do this�.� In 1979, a few months after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, an Assembly of Experts was elected to translate Ayatollah Khomeini�s vision of a theocratic government into a constitution. Khomeini had mobilized Shi�ite clerics with his theory of v...

The Next Financial Meltdown?

Sunday, April 15 11:30 pm

Despite having co-authored a book forecasting the next financial meltdown, Simon Johnson is optimistic about the future. �You�re here because you�re worried,� he said to the standing-room only crowd at NPR West in Culver City. �If I were addressing only three people in this room, I wouldn�t be optimistic.� Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT, Baseline Scenario blogger and co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, explained what led t...

The Birth of McDonald's

Sunday, April 15 1:02 am

On April 15, 1955, Ray Kroc opened a burger joint in Des Plaines, Illinois, that would later become one of the world's largest corporations: McDonald's. But the restaurant chain that has expanded its operation to 119 countries and served over 100 billion hamburgers over the past half-century did not originate with a former milkshake machine man in Illinois. Instead, Kroc was inspired by the radical new idea of fast food that the McDonald brothers had established in San Bernardino county year...

How Water Shapes Human History

Sunday, April 15 12:54 am

Steven Solomon, a journalist who has written for The New York Times, Business Week, and The Economist, explains in his latest book that oil may not be the resource we need to worry about exhausting. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization captures water�s crucial importance to the rise and fall of empires past, and the conflicts it may spark today. In the excerpt below, Solomon, who visits Z�calo on April 19, starts with the invention of the steam engine to show how wate...

Zócalo Public Square Book Prize

Saturday, April 14 10:06 am

�Z�calo is the best thing to happen to Los Angeles intellectual life in decades. I can't imagine a better organization to honor today�s best thinking on the nature of community.� �Author and Book Prize Judge Greg Critser The Z�calo Public Square Book Prize will be awarded annually to the U.S.-published book that most enhances our understanding of community � the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion � be it locally, regionally, nationally or globall...

Driving Through China

Saturday, April 14 12:13 am

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory By Peter Hessler �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Country Driving begins with a driver�s license. It is the story of rapid change in China�s diverse landscapes � dying villages, growing villages, and booming factory towns � joined by highways and an ever increasing number of cars. �By the summer of 2001, when I applied to the Beijing Public Safety Traffic Bureau, I had lived in China for five years,� Peter Hessler writes. �Duri...

Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers

Friday, April 13 12:39 am

Despite the bailouts and stimulus packages, Simon Johnson sees trouble ahead. Johnson, a professor at MIT�s Sloan School of Management, argues in his and James Kwak�s 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, that big banks still rule the global economy and are setting us up for the next meltdown. In the excerpt below, Johnson, who spoke about his book at Z�calo, and Kwak recount the events of one crucial White House meeting and explain why governments need banker...

Darra Goldstein

Thursday, April 12 12:55 pm

Darra Goldstein is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Russian at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. She has published numerous books and articles on literature, culture, art, and cuisine, and is the author of four cookbooks. Below, she tells us a little bit about herself. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. In Moscow, during the Soviet days, when things were difficult, I went to the communal apartmen...

Maite Gomez-Rejón

Thursday, April 12 12:45 pm

Maite Gomez-Rej�n has worked in the education departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA and the Getty Villa; and has worked as a private chef and caterer. In 2008, she founded ArtBites, art and culinary history combined with hands-on cooking instruction. Her blog �Cooking Art History� is set to appear in The Huffington Post. Below, Gomez-Rej�n tells us more about herself. Q. What is the last thing that inspired you? A. My family is in town right now, and having them here is ...

Charlie Grosso

Thursday, April 12 12:32 pm

Charlie Grosso, a Chinese American woman with a male Italian name, was born in 1979 in Taipei, Taiwan, where she lived until she was 11. She studied theater design at USC and studied photography with many well-known commercial photographers, including Jay Maisel. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, and her most recent efforts have been focused on a single body of work, Wok the Dog. Before speaking about food photography at Z�calo, she told us a bit more about her...

What Life Was Like in the First Century

Wednesday, April 11 11:24 pm

When Scott Korb set out to study early Palestine for his Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine, traveling to the region and interviewing expert archaeologists, he came to a surprising conclusion about what�s known of the time. �The people we�re talking about are Jewish. That�s really all we can say for sure,� said Korb, also the author of The Faith Between Us. The rest, he said, is about �opening up the reader to the possibility of imagining.� Below, he chats w...

Picturing Food

Sunday, April 9 12:31 am

Flipping through images of the Getty�s Tasteful Pictures exhibit, KCRW�s Evan Kleiman captured the essential puzzle of taking pictures of food. �We can�t just shut up and eat,� she said to the capacity crowd. �We have to ponder.� Kleiman joined Artbites� Maite Gomez-Rej�n, photographer Charlie Grosso, and Gastronomica founding editor Darra Goldstein to figure out what so moves us about food captured on film � or by digital camera. Warts, bumps, fuzz, shine The earliest food photo...

The Rural Brain Drain

Saturday, April 8 12:16 am

Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel �Brain drain� was once good for America. The great minds � Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann � that fled fascism during the 1930s reaffirmed the idea of the U.S. as a land of opportunity, and a haven for scientific progress and intellectual advancement. But today, a brain drain is hurting America�s heartland. The alarming picture that Patrick J....

Inventing Breakfast

Thursday, April 6 11:55 pm

Born April 7, 1860, Will Keith Kellogg was responsible for radically changing the way Americans eat breakfast. With his older brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, he invented the first breakfast cereal, an early version of today�s Corn Flakes, which sold more than one million cases in its first three years and earned his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, the title of �cereal city.� In The Original Has This Signature: W.K. Kellogg, Horace B. Powell recounts the Kellogg brothers� accidental inve...

Chasing the White Dog

Thursday, April 6 12:27 am

Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine �by Max Watman Max Watman traces the popular stereotype of the moonshiner back to an 1877 issue of Harper�s Weekly, which sent an undoubtedly genteel New York writer on assignment to Kentucky to observe the strange specimen: �Clad in garments of butternut, sometimes yellow, oft-times brown, and occasionally blue jeans, and always homespun, with hands in pockets �the moonshiner on arriving in Louisville, where all of his k...

How Coyote Capitalism Hurts Immigrants

Tuesday, April 4 10:54 pm

Jeffrey Kaye, a special correspondent for PBS, argues that policies to encourage immigration may actually hurt immigrants. Governments, corporations, recruiters, and even human smugglers all participate in what Kaye, author of Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration, calls a "global system" that turns migrants, whether legal or illegal, into something like human cargo. "I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way," he assures, but "it all kind of works together." Below,...

Los Angeles Promotes Itself

Sunday, April 2 12:20 am

William Deverell and Greg Hise's A Companion to Los Angeles pulls together 25 essays from scholars of the city, spanning disciplines and subjects and eras. Anthea Hartig, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Western Office, writes of the city's spectacular boom in the early 20th century thanks to water, railroads, citrus, "a most advantageous spot on the map", and the best boosters in the West. Below, an excerpt from her essay. After securing water and eventual rail...

A Telescopic View of World War II

Monday, March 31 11:50 pm

Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Barrett Tillman love planes. He loves pilots and dogfights and engines. This propensity comes through quite clearly in Whirlwind, his history of "The Air War Against Japan" in World War II. The history is very technical; it lists, day by day, who dropped how many bombs on which targets from what altitudes. It offers tidbits about how the men of the Army Air Forces operated, what equipment t...

Otto von Bismarck

Monday, March 31 11:46 pm

Born in Prussia on April 1, 1815, Otto von Bismarck went on to become the first chancellor of Germany and the mastermind behind its unification. Known for his ruthless but brilliant politics, Bismarck was lionized almost instantly upon his death, but his role in European history has undergone critical reassessment since the reunification of Germany 20 years ago. Below, in Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor, Volker Ullrich explores the myths and realities surrounding Bismarck�s legacy. Many peopl...

�The Spectator is Compelled��, 1966-1968

Monday, March 31 11:43 pm

by Sid Miller �The Spectator is Compelled��, 1966-1968 -after the painting and photo-emulsion by John Baldessari The ordinary man wears dark slacks, a white dress shirt and his hair in an ordinary short fashion.� The spectator is compelled to look directly down the road and into the middle of the picture. The spectator and the ordinary man are one. The road that he stands on too is ordinary.� The shutter closing is the only movement here�no sparrows take fli...

The Rise and Fall of the Yugo

Sunday, March 30 11:19 pm

Jason Vuic, an assistant professor of modern European history at Bridgewater College, can list �those rare instances in which Yugoslavia entered the American consciousness�: Vlade Divac signing with the Lakers; the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics; the Los Angeles Olympics that same year, boycotted by a dozen communist countries but not by Yugoslavia; and war and dictatorship. �I had a Yugoslav radar,� Vuic said. �Other than these few instances, the number one cultural artifact was without a doubt the...

Can the Government Save Journalism?

Friday, March 29 11:39 pm

The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Healthcare reform passed perhaps because enough people recognized a hard-to-swallow truth: people need healthcare and the free market is not providing it well enough. Substitute the news for healthcare and you have a compelling argument for subsidized journalism. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols do not make this explic...

How Long Can Humans Live?

Thursday, March 28 11:37 pm

Science writer Greg Critser knows the world may be a strange place in 2050 if humans are living longer: one in four people will be over 65, compared to one in nine today, and one million people will be 100 years old and up. "What we're going to see, and what you can already see, is there will be two classes of elderly people," Critser said. "The fairly poor and the fairly well off." Critser chatted with Z�calo's Swati Pandey about his latest book, Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging...

Post: Green Airy Space

Thursday, March 28 11:36 pm

by Elaine Bleakney I have carried for so long� thinking this would only be space again for the city, walking its strands, kissing passing thumpers. A flat now vaulted Our circuitry. I can make Best Coffee in here. It tastes my memory. He tastes...

The Secret Lives of Buildings

Monday, March 25 11:47 pm

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib Buildings are not simply buildings, according to Edward Hollis. They are stories waiting to be told and retold. In The Secret Lives of Buildings, Hollis, an architect and architecture teacher, analyzes the history of thirteen buildings that have left their mark on the Western world. He sets out to prove that buildings take on new personas...

Refugee

Monday, March 25 10:19 am

by Chris Abani The man straps his coffin to a rickety bike as he and his family fill it with all their worldly possessions, in respect for the way that is Igbo. He pedals shakily uphill, his family following behind on foot. �from Daphne's Lot, Red Hen Press (2003) *Photo courtesy sl4sh79....

Are Corporate Boards Ruining Business?

Monday, March 25 12:33 am

Money for Nothing: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions by John Gillespie and David Zweig �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Over the last decade, the business world has suffered from a number of well-known disasters. Companies like Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual collapsed, wiping out billions in shareholder value. Others like Tyco were essentially looted by CEOs who enriched themselves at the expense of their shareholders. And then ...

Ian Buruma

Sunday, March 24 5:15 pm

Ian Buruma was born in Holland in 1951. During his Z�calo talk on religion, he remembered Holland as a country that �as late as the 1960s � and people forget this � was still a profoundly religious place. On Sundays, you�d hear very little but various kinds of preaching.� That collapsed over the course of the decade, he said. Before his lecture, Buruma, author of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, told us more about himself. Q. What comforts you? A. A good spi...

Do Religion and Democracy Mix?

Saturday, March 23 11:12 pm

Ian Buruma grew up in Holland with an atheist father and a Jewish mother. Quoting writer Adam Gopnick, he said his family expressed that faith only �in the zeal with which they celebrated Christmas.� �We had to have a bigger Christmas tree than the goyim,� he joked with the crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue. While his Holland, he said, was still a profoundly religious place in the 1960s, today�s Western Europe thinks of religion as �a problem that we had licked by now.� Buruma, author of Tami...

Why Are Boys Falling Behind?

Saturday, March 23 12:15 am

Richard Whitmire, a longtime education reporter, often focused his work on the idea that girls were being shortchanged in schools. �I had two daughters and I thought this was an outrage,� he said. �I wrote these articles uncritically, and it wasn�t long afterward that I realized it was a big mistake.� He found that boys � from his extended family, his local schools, and from national data � were falling behind in school. Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational ...

Zócalo's "This is My City"

Thursday, March 21 11:14 pm

Z�calo Field Producer Laura Villalpando, in a video entry for Los Angeles magazine's Get L.A. contest, roamed Los Angeles asking friends and strangers to tell us, in their native languages, what they most love and what they most hate about our city. "This is My City" is about the hard work, big dreams, loss and longing that unites our global city. Vote for the video to win here....

John Yoo's Crisis and Command

Monday, March 19 12:57 am

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush by John Yoo �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher In Crisis and Command, John Yoo, known primarily for his controversial take on what is and isn�t torture, rebukes critics of the Bush administration�s alleged abuse of his office. Yoo argues that nothing Bush did in response to 9/11 � authorizing coercive interrogation, holding detainees at Guantanamo, leading the country into Iraq, ordering the �surge� � wa...

Michelle Alexander

Sunday, March 18 11:38 am

Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University. Previously, she was a member of the faculty of Stanford Law School, and director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. Her first book is The New Jim Crow:� Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Before speaking at Z�calo at the Hammer, she told us a bit more about herself. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. My engagement ring. Q. What was the last thin...

Is Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?

Saturday, March 17 11:52 pm

Michelle Alexander spent years as a civil rights lawyer, believing that the criminal justice system, like other American institutions, was �infected with a conscious and unconscious bias� against people of color. It wasn�t until her years working on racial profiling, drug enforcement and police brutality that she realized it was �a different beast entirely.� �I came to see that the mass incarceration of poor people of color has emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised syst...

Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow

Saturday, March 17 1:13 am

Decades have passed since the civil rights legislation and the Supreme Court overturned Jim Crow laws, which had prevented African Americans from becoming full and equal participants in political life since the end of the Civil War. But have they returned in a new guise? Michelle Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, initially thought activists who saw vestiges of Jim Crow in present-day institution were, in a word, crazy. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the A...

Ted Conover

Friday, March 16 4:52 pm

Ted Conover, born in Okinawa and raised mostly in Colorado, has spent a lot of time on the road. For Coyotes and Rolling Nowhere, he traveled across the country with migrant workers and the homeless. And for The Routes of Man, Conover logged a total of 15 months� time abroad, shuttling between his New York City home and Peru, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. �From the moment my parents let me take long-distance bike rides, travel for me was a way of being independent, of having self-determinat...

How Roads Shape Our Lives

Thursday, March 15 11:36 pm

The six roads Ted Conover traveled for his The Routes of Man were not the first treacherous ones he came to know. Working on his book Coyotes, Conover attempted a trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles with migrant workers in a beat-up station wagon. An hour along, the station wagon broke down, and the driver disappeared with the money Conover and his fellow travelers had paid for the trip. They finally hopped a Southwest flight for a quarter of what they�d paid their driver, got to Los Angeles...

How Does Politics Shape National Security?

Thursday, March 15 12:21 am

Julian E. Zelizer, a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton, came across the idea for his Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security - From World War II to the War on Terrorism shortly after 9/11. Watching Americans react to the event, Zelizer said, he was interested in �how quickly politics reemerged after that event, and how quickly both parties started to fight with each other.� He added, �Many people said, this shows it�s not like it used to be � in the past, w...

Steve Westly

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Steve Westly is a Managing Partner of The Westly Group, a venture capital firm that invests primarily in clean technology companies. Prior to founding The Westly Group, he served as the Controller and Chief Fiscal Officer of the state of California. Read more about him below. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. My parents. Q. What comforts you? A. People who are passionate. Particularly if they have some data behind them. Q. When do you feel most creative? A...

Lisa Margonelli

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Lisa Margonelli directs the Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, was recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association. Below, she tells us more about herself. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. Definitely a five-dollar pony. I grew up on a farm in Maine, and our neighbor was selling it. My father and I went and got ...

Michael P. Wilson

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Michael P. Wilson is a research scientist at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, and Acting Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. His work linking green chemistry with chemicals policy helped launch the California Green Chemistry Initiative. Read more about him below. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. The thing that comes to mind is the confidence in ideas and their ability to change the way things are. That was t...

Sunil Paul

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Sunil Paul is an entrepreneur and investor in clean energy and transportation companies. He is founder of the Gigaton Throwdown, a project to educate and inspire entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers to think big about climate solutions. Read more about him below. Q. What is the greatest gift you have ever received? A. My kids. Q. What is the last thing that inspired you? A. One of the last things that inspired me is also one of the first. I was a Boy Scout back in Tennesse...

Kathy Gerwig

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Kathy Gerwig is the Environmental Stewardship Officer for Kaiser Permanente, responsible for making the healthcare company�s work more environmentally sustainable. Read more about her below. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. Meeting the person who ended up being my husband. Q. What was the last thing that inspired you? A. I was inspired yesterday at a Senate hearing on federal chemical reform. That sounds really boring, but it looks like we might get bipartisan ...

Joseph Oldham

Monday, March 12 4:40 pm

Joseph Oldham is Sustainability Manager of the City of Fresno and chairman of the Fresno Green Team.� He is directly responsible for implementing Fresno�s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy.� Read more about him below. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. Life. Q. What was the last thing that inspired you? A. My brother�s death a month ago. We�re only here for a short period of time and it�s our responsibility to do the most that we can while we�re here. ...

Tracey Grose

Monday, March 12 4:39 pm

Tracey Grose led the development of a taxonomy of �green industries� and a database of firms providing goods or services aimed at reducing or reversing environmental harm. She also led a nationwide analysis on behalf of the Pew Charitable Trusts for the Clean Energy Economy report. Read more about her below. Q. What is the best gift you have ever received? A. I like simple things. Flowers and hugs. Q. What comforts you? A. A good night�s sleep. Q. When do you feel most creativ...

The Green Boom?

Monday, March 12 1:45 am

Over 30 years ago, California�s decision to require cleaner cars didn�t sit well with American automakers. �Detroit said, �What, are you people mad out there in California? We�re supposed to make different cars for every state?�� explained Steve Westly, former California State Controller and author of two books on alternative energy. But within months, every state in the country matched California�s law, and countries around the world soon followed. �California can lead the clean te...

Ten Years Old and Divorced

Sunday, March 11 12:51 am

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced Nujood Ali and Delphine Minoui �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel High-profile divorces are usually thrilling tabloid fodder. But in Nujood Ali�s case, the act of asking for a divorce � not to mention getting it � shook the Muslim world, caused the Yemeni parliament to raise the age of consent to 17 for boys and girls, and earned the then-10-year-old international press attention, including being named Glamour magazine�s Woman of the Year in 2008. It also gave ...

Ted Conover on Speed and the Open Road

Saturday, March 10 12:44 am

Ted Conover, author of several books including Newjack and Rolling Nowhere, spans the world in The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, his study of six crucial roads in Peru, East Africa, the West Bank, India, China, and Nigeria. In the excerpt below, Conover, who visits Z�calo on March 15, considers the history of speed - -from the first teenage driver Phaeton to the first woman to drive the Indy 500 to his own four-hour teenage trek through Colorado i...

How Does China Help Africa?

Thursday, March 9 1:33 am

The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa by Deborah Brautigam �Reviewed by Angilee Shah If the headlines are any indication, it�s time for a proper China scare. A sampling from recent news stories on China�s involvement in Africa include: �China throws birthday bash for Zimbabwe�s Mugabe� (Reuters), �Namibia Bans Chinese Investment in Beauty Salons� (Bloomberg), and �China Unicom Denies African Expansion� (Forbes). But Deborah Brautigam�s exhaustive account of Chinese a...

John A. Rich

Wednesday, March 8 4:08 pm

John A. Rich, Professor and Chair of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, applied to Dartmouth on a whim � at the advice of his eye doctor. When he was accepted early decision and went to visit campus with his father, Rich learned that going to Dartmouth had been his father�s hope as well. �My dad had gone to Howard undergrad, and that was really the only choice he had, being an African American man in Washington, DC,� Rich said. �He got an applicati...

Understanding Urban Violence

Wednesday, March 8 12:05 am

John Rich founded the Young Men�s Health Clinic at the Boston Medical Center as a modest project with a big goal. �At that time, you could pretty much do anything as long as it didn�t cost anybody any money,� joked Rich, author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men. Rich�s plan was to draw young African American male patients from other parts of the hospital � the surgery wards, the dermatology clinic, the emergency department � so that he coul...

Repairing Ulysses S. Grant's Reputation

Saturday, March 4 1:08 am

U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Civil War America) by Joan Waugh That Ulysses S. Grant�s most visible commemoration � his scowling and sad portrait on the fifty-dollar bill � came out on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash is cruelly fitting. Like the market, Grant�s reputation towered before it collapsed suddenly sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The difference is that Grant�s memory has mostly stayed sunk. A statue of the general astride his favorite hors...

All in the Family's 200th Episode

Saturday, March 4 1:00 am

After a wildly successful eight year run, �All in the Family� aired its 200th episode on March 4, 1979. By then, the show had irrevocably changed the image of the American family, but creator Norman Lear initially faced challenges from network censors who feared the show was too politically charged and producers who viewed the show as a marked departure from the popular family sitcoms of the 1960s. Below, in Archie Bunker's America: TV in an Era of Change 1968-1978, Josh Ozersky comments on ...

Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy

Friday, March 3 12:58 am

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea By Barbara Demick �Reviewed by Angilee Shah As Barbara Demick introduces it, North Korea is quite literally a dark spot in East Asia. At night the country goes black. From space, it looks like a hole surrounded by the electrified cities in South Korea, China and Japan. �When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not ...

John Rich on Urban Violence

Thursday, March 2 12:51 am

John A. Rich, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow and chair of the Department of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health, catalogs in Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men his quest to understand the cycle of violence in American cities. In the excerpt below, Rich, who visits Z�calo on March 5, explains what drove him to understand the often violent lives of young black men. I will never forget the day in 1990 that I ran int...

The Future of Environmental Disasters

Wednesday, March 1 12:29 am

Robert Hernan�s This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from the Fifteen Worst Environmental Disasters around the World studies over a dozen environmental disasters, but one is particularly close to Hernan. In the early 1990s, Hernan served as legal counsel for the State of New York in the Love Canal trial, against the chemical company that turned the Niagara Falls neighborhood into a toxic waste site � thick black goo bubbled up in backyards, toxic chemicals seeped into basements, and an elementary sc...

Ha Jin's "The Bane of the Internet"

Tuesday, February 26 12:50 am

Z�calo last chatted with Ha Jin about his collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant, and his own experience as� Chinese immigrant to the U.S. His latest story collection, A Good Fall, takes up similar themes. Below, "The Bane of the Internet," the story that starts the collection of tales about the uneasy and long process of immigrating. My sister Yuchin and I used to write each other letters. It took more than ten days for the mail to reach Sichuan, and usually I wrote her once a month...

Julia Sweig

Monday, February 25 12:35 pm

Julia E. Sweig is the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America studies and director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Most recently she is the author of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know. Before taking the podium to discuss the book, Sweig told us a bit more about herself. Q. What was the last thing that inspired you? A. Juanes, the Colombian singer whose concert in Havana I was marginally involved with putting together. I was blown away...

What's Next for Cuba?

Monday, February 25 12:34 am

Two years to the day since Raul Castro took office in Cuba � replacing his long-ruling and then-ailing brother Fidel � Julia Sweig visited Z�calo at the Skirball Cultural Center to talk about changes in the country and its relations with the U.S. �Your timing, Z�calo, is excellent,� Sweig said. Focusing on recent history, Sweig explained the changes Raul Castro�s leadership initiated, the roadblocks his reforms encountered, and where Cuba stands today. Thirty-four minutes In the ...

Do Corporations Need to Know Pop Culture?

Sunday, February 24 12:53 am

Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation by Grant McCracken �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Anthropologist Grant McCracken thinks that every corporation needs a chief culture officer. The CCO, rather than eyeballing finances or performance like his peers at the top of the corporate heap, would keep an eye on �culture, both its fads and its fashions, and its deep, enduring structures.� If the role seems slightly nebulous, that�s because it is.� When McCracken is ...

Can We Predict Natural Disasters?

Saturday, February 23 1:00 am

Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe by Florin Diacu �Reviewed by Jodie C. Liu In light of the recent tragedy in Haiti, Florin Diacu�s Megadisasters seems almost frighteningly relevant. Published just weeks before an earthquake struck the Caribbean island, Megadisasters offers a thoughtful explanation of the science behind natural disasters and how, with better predictive tools, we may be able to minimize their toll. Diacu began investigating disasters afte...

Alexandra Natapoff on Snitching

Friday, February 22 12:45 am

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," ...

Cuba's Ties to the World

Monday, February 19 12:37 am

Julia Sweig, Director for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, remembers encountering three brands on her first trip to Cuba in 1984: Copelia ice cream, Popular brand cigarettes, and Fidel Castro. No matter the leader's refusal to build statues and other monuments to himself, "The revolution didn't need to remind Cubans of who ran the show. For nearly� half a century, Fidel was ubiquitous." Today's Cuba is different and has, Sweig writes in Cuba: What Everyone Needs to...

Did Women Bring Down Palin?

Sunday, February 18 1:28 am

You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman by Leslie Sanchez �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib Using Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and to some extent, Michelle Obama, as anchors, Leslie Sanchez�s You�ve Come A Long Way, Maybe explores the role of women in politics � not only as candidates or wives of candidates but also as voters and commentators. It is women who were unkindest to women, according to Sanchez: from Charlotte Allen acc...

The Sounds of Islam

Saturday, February 17 2:27 am

Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star's Revolution by Salman Ahmad �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Rock & Roll Jihad is a straightforward autobiography of a man who, by age 18, knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Salman Ahmad, whose Sufi rock band Junoon introduced rock and roll to Pakistan, sees music as the cultural bridge between conservatives and progressives, East and West. It is an unabashedly positive life summary � complete with introductory remarks by Meliss...

Worse Than War

Friday, February 16 12:39 am

Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Daniel Jonah Goldhagen made quite a splash when he blamed ordinary Germans for the Holocaust in Hitler�s Willing Executioners. His newest effort isn�t quite as controversial, though it aspires to be equally dramatic. �Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence,� warns the first sentence of Worse Than...

Roadside America

Monday, February 12 1:14 am

John Margolies' Roadside America captures fading landmarks to American automobile culture. Margolies, appetite whetted on road trips with parents who never pulled over, began crisscrossing the country in the mid-1970s. He documented against blue skies motels, drive-ins, diners, gas stations and other businesses with eye-catching architecture. Mainstream architects took time to come around to his appreciation, notes Phil Patton in his introduction to the volume of photographs. It wasn't until...

The Language of Pain

Sunday, February 11 12:09 am

The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief by David Biro �Reviewed by Jodie C. Liu Pain is universally felt but poorly articulated. Where doctors may dress it in clinical language and medical terminology, writers and other artists rely on metaphor. The two realms may seem disparate, but in The Language of Pain, David Biro chips away at this division. Just as Edvard Munch�s iconic �The Scream� could only portray a noiseless cry, there seems a built-in deficiency in ...

Why the French Don't Like Headscarves

Saturday, February 10 1:27 am

Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space By John R. Bowen �Reviewed by Angilee Shah Americans share with the French an ideal of religious freedom. But last month, France considered a law that would be unlikely to gain much traction here: A parliamentary commission recommended that France draft and pass a law banning burqas � the loose cloak, headscarf and veil donned by some Muslim women �� in public service spaces, including government offices, public...

Marketing in the Age of the Niche

Wednesday, February 9 12:59 am

No Size Fits All: From Mass Marketing to Mass Handselling by Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel In the movies, all it takes to crack the in-crowd is one savvy make-over. If only it were so easy. In a consumer landscape where every crowd is the in-crowd � and the mass market made of many in-crowds � marketers need to shape-shift constantly, and hock their wares one niche at a time. In No Size Fits All, Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone suggest that this isn�t a ...

Joyce Appleby on Capitalism's History

Tuesday, February 8 1:35 am

Joyce Appleby, author of The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, stopped by Z�calo's offices to explain why capitalism is a cultural system rather than a purely economic one. She chats with Swati Pandey about pinpointing where and when capitalism began, what caused it to flourish, and whether it's a good thing. *Video by Laura Villalpando. Photo courtesy moneyc.net....

Gregg Easterbrook

Saturday, February 5 2:37 pm

Gregg Easterbrook was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, but has lived with his former foreign service officer wife on most every continent. But, he says, �My favorite place on Earth is Seattle, and my wife refuses to move there.� Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed, reveals more about himself below. Q. What�s the last habit you tried to kick? A. I�ve tried to kick spending far too much of my life watching football on TV, and it just hasn�t worked. Q. W...

Hitler's Gamble

Saturday, February 5 4:19 am

1938: Hitler's Gamble by Giles MacDonogh �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher Giles MacDonogh starts and finishes this fine brief study of the Third Reich in the �crucial� year of 1938. The three key events of both the book and the year are the annexation of Austria, the Munich Agreement, and the intensified persecution of Jews living under Nazi rule. MacDonogh, who has written a handful of books about German history, organizes 1938 chronologically. This type of structure � the chapter title...

Is the CIA Beyond Repair?

Thursday, February 3 1:13 am

Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA by Charles S. Faddis �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher How much safer would the world be if America could only find Osama bin Laden and infiltrate Al Qaeda, and figure out exactly what the North Koreans and Iranians are up to with their nuclear programs? Charles Faddis, a recently retired twenty year veteran of the CIA, thinks it�s not an impossible goal. In Beyond Repair, Faddis argues that American spies should be able to achieve these obje...

Sonic Boom by Gregg Easterbrook

Wednesday, February 2 1:15 am

Gregg Easterbrook's Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed looks beyond the economic crisis to the boom that's bound to follow, one that, Easterbrook argues, will be unlike any we've experienced before. In the excerpt below, Easterbrook, author of six books and an upcoming Z�calo guest, explains why globalization is just getting started. From the Industrial Revolution until the current generation, most nations threw much of their wealth and energy into building machineries for warfare. N...

Have Americans Been Carjacked?

Friday, January 31 11:58 pm

Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez grew up together, as Catherine put it, �in the backseat, getting driven around, going on at least an annual family adventure in the car.� Their relationships with cars grew more complex in adulthood: both have lived in cities with easy-to-use public transportation, and in suburbs where cars were a costly necessity, and traffic a constant frustration. When two people they were close to died in car accidents, the two began work on Carjacked: The Culture o...

Jaron Lanier

Tuesday, January 29 1:44 pm

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. He is credited with coining the term �Virtual Reality,� and was a founding contributing editor of Wired. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (but certainly not Wikipedia) includes him in its list of history's 300 or so greatest inventors.� Below, the author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, tells us more about himself. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. My incessant attachment to the Bay Area sense of ...

Jaron Lanier: Computers Can't Replace Us

Tuesday, January 29 12:14 am

At the Actors� Gang, Jaron Lanier greeted his audience as no other Z�calo audience has ever been greeted: �Hello, humans.� It was an appropriate way for Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary and author of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, to begin to explain why humans still matter in a computer-obsessed age. Exploring everything from what he calls the first computer � dating back to the ancient world � to why the iPad won�t save the world, Lanier argued that crowds may not be so wise, ever...

St. Thomas Aquinas

Monday, January 28 1:05 am

January 28 marks the Feast Day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Roman Catholic priest who authored Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, shaping Catholic Church and philosophy for centuries to come. Below, writing on a different subject in Commentary on Sentences, Aquinas explores the issue of �whether knowledge is higher than love.� In all things there is a twofold perfection: one by which the thing subsists in itself, the other by which it is related to other things. And in material t...

A Woman's Choice

Monday, January 28 1:02 am

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women by Marnia Lazreg �Reviewed by Angilee Shah If Muslim women�s bodies represent the war of ideas about Islam, the veil is the greatest battleground. The way Muslim women dress has raised much anxiety in the world, enough for France to ban headscarves in public schools and Saudi Arabia to require that women cover themselves head to toe. To Marnia Lazreg, the issue is of utmost importance � she is a soldier in the trenches. A sociology...

Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto

Sunday, January 27 2:04 am

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande If you happen to be one of the 90,000 Americans admitted on any given day to what Atul Gawande elegantly terms �the glassed bay of an ICU,� you might wish you�d never known some of what he reveals in his The Checklist Manifesto. Every patient in an ICU, according to one study, requires on average 178 tasks a day for his care, from administering medication to suctioning lungs. Each task poses a risk. The error rate is low...

Jaron Lanier on Staying Human

Saturday, January 26 1:17 am

Jaron Lanier, a long regarded as a visionary of Silicon Valley, explains in his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, why decades-old programming decisions dictate the current structure of the Internet, and why it's not a good one. Below, an excerpt that explains what extreme technophiles have in common with religious fundamentalists, how computers and the web are making us more antihuman, and how Facebook and Twitter make us seem ever more abstract. What Do You Do When the Techi...

José Ramón Sánchez on the Iraq Papers

Thursday, January 24 11:36 pm

Jos� Ram�n S�nchez began putting together The Iraq Papers with three colleagues when they realized, he said, �how important this war is going to be to this generation.� Just as the Vietnam War was documented through collections of key papers, S�nchez and his co-editors pulled together as much objective material as they could to understand the origin and import of the Iraq war. Below, S�nchez discusses with Z�calo�s Swati Pandey the old origins of the war, its shifting justifications and fron...

The New Black

Tuesday, January 22 1:36 pm

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression by Darian Leader �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib What came first � depression or anti-depressants? Darian Leader�s The New Black begins by providing a context for the pervasiveness of depression. While it will surprise no one that the pharmaceutical industry has helped manipulate depression into its current status as the largest public health problem after heart disease, Leader develops this argument into a comprehensive case for revivin...

A Genocide Story

Tuesday, January 22 12:33 am

"If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die":How Genocide was Stopped in East Timor By Geoffrey Robinson �Reviewed by Angilee Shah The United Nations has defined genocide as �any act committed with the idea of destroying in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,� but what does genocide really mean? Where does it come from and how does it feel? How do �ordinary men� become �willing executioners?� Geoffrey Robinson gives offers an in-depth recounting of genocide in Ea...

The Search for Genius in a Skull

Monday, January 21 2:13 am

Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey Our grim fascination with the autopsies of prematurely passed stars and starlets � the craving for those intimate, if clinical, details of the body � is not just a modern phenomenon. Take the case of Elizabeth Roose, a Viennese actress who died in childbirth in 1808. The critically acclaimed scion of a prominent theater family, Roose came to be the subject of a peculiar indignity, or distinction (it was, after all, ...

Christian Dior

Monday, January 21 2:10 am

Christian Dior, born January 21, 1905, restored the hourglass to women�s fashion in the bleak aftermath of World War II. The corseted waists and full skirts of the New Look found wild success � and some criticism � in the middle of last century, establishing Dior as a major player in the industry and defining the look of the 1950s. Below, Dorothy Rompalske recounts the impact of Dior�s revolutionary 1947 fashion show, how the look got its name, and why so many were against it. In one fell...

Ruth Reichl

Sunday, January 20 3:40 pm

Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet magazine, grew up when, she says, �America wasn�t very proud of its food. It was a hot dog and hamburger time.� Reichl took to cooking at a very young age, continuing to make large meals for friends until after graduate school, when a friend suggested she write a cook book. �If you went to a publisher today and said I want to write a cookbook, they�d say, where did you learn to cook, who�s testing your recipes,� she said. �In 1971, they said, hey, th...

Evan Kleiman

Sunday, January 20 3:31 pm

Evan Kleiman initially chose cooking over talking. �I was a very shy kid,� she said. �I learned you could still be in the room and serve people, but you didn�t have to actually talk if you made the food.� Before becoming known for doing both � as host of KCRW�s Good Food and owner and chef of Angeli Caffe � Kleiman baked cookies to sell at her high school and put herself through college catering. Read more about Kleiman below. Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick? A. Eating too ...

A Celebration of Gourmet Magazine

Sunday, January 20 12:44 am

After 70 years, Gourmet magazine ceased publication in October by order of its parent company, Conde Nast. While the decision to cut the magazine that long set the standard for epicurean living � with its heavily-tested recipes, expert food photography, and rich writing � was much discussed, KCRW�s Evan Kleiman joined Z�calo to have a different sort of conversation, as she joined former Gourmet editors Ruth Reichl and Laurie Ochoa and former Gourmet writer Jonathan Gold. �This is a wonder...

Tomás Jiménez on Mexican Americans

Friday, January 19 1:40 am

Tom�s Jim�nez knew that something was missing from the way the press and academia portrayed Mexican Americans. Growing up in California in a Mexican American family, Jim�nez said he noticed �that there was an incredible amount of diversity within the Mexican origin population � socioeconomic diversity, diversity with respect to legal status, diversity with respect to language abilities, the way people looked.� Jim�nez, a past Z�calo guest, began to study immigrant assimilation, particularly ...

The Case for Books

Monday, January 15 1:42 am

The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton �Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib The debate between physical and digital books is often framed as an either-or proposition. It seems as if the romantics who love the smell of musty books are arrayed under a flag on some medieval battlefield, while a Kindle-wielding new generation launches digital warfare from the safety of their laptops. This is why it is refreshing to read a narrative where the two factions negotiate peace....

Sisters in War

Sunday, January 14 12:50 am

Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq by Christina Asquith �Reviewed by Saskia Vogel Sisters in War reads like a serial drama, kicking off with the fall of Saddam Hussein in a time of na�ve hope. Christina Asquith�s breezy style still captures the complexities of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, particularly how one can be anti-Republican, think that war always has an especially negative impact on women, and still see the good in clearing the way fo...

Daniel Pink on What Motivates Us

Saturday, January 13 2:07 am

As Daniel Pink found while writing Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, carrots and sticks are very last century. The go-to method of meting out rewards and punishments, used by employers, parents, and presidents alike, isn�t a great way to get people to do well, Pink argues. �I started looking at some of the research on the science of human motivation,� he said. �If we respect the science, the answers could light the way for us to work a bit smarter.� Pink, who will discuss ...

The Real Cost of Poor Working Conditions

Friday, January 12 2:19 am

Jody Heymann�s study of working conditions around the world may not seem to have a lot to do with her clinical training as a pediatrician. �If you look at what determines health, at least half of the equation is social conditions,� Heymann, founding director of the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, explained. �The workplace is one of the biggest forces shaping the conditions under which we live, both for working men and women as well as their children and elderly pa...

Why are Bargains Bad?

Thursday, January 11 12:14 am

Gordon Laird, after years as a student and journalist in China, started to see "that this part of the world was becoming a major driver of human history." Combining his work on energy, climate, and poverty issues with his work in China, Laird began work on The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization. "I was just following the story. It's a very old-fashioned project in that regard," he said. "The reporting launched some big questions that led to a larger invest...

The Price of a Bargain, by Gordon Laird

Thursday, January 11 12:12 am

Gordon Laird reported from Los Angeles for The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization. He found the city's most crucial economic input to be not movie stars or tourists, but shipping containers. "The profound way that Los Angeles has wagered upon the continued health of globalization � and has done so using some pretty ingenious strategies and has spent no small amount of money on it � really does make it a city of the future," Laird said. "But I"m not sure if...

Wedding Night (I-10 West)

Thursday, January 11 12:08 am

by Jenny Browne Six hours into the Texas desert, headlights bubble-wrap the darkness where others who have just crossed over walk days without speaking. The first thing she did was change her shoes. Her father drank the half-finished mimosas left on the veranda, muttering �those are like five dollar bills flying away.� Don�t we all possible a different self in that distant, visible land, living like cargo, smuggling one body into another? By morning, the scenery should show up...

Remembering Bobby Salcedo

Saturday, January 8 12:13 am

Agustin Roberto "Bobby" Salcedo, an assistant principal and school board member in El Monte, California, was shot to death last week while spending the holidays in Mexico. As his family, his friends, and his city honor his memory, Michael Jaime-Becerra, an El Monte native who explores the city in his fiction, pays tribute to his long-time friend. On New Year�s Day my wife and I were driving to my parents� home for our annual tradition of menudo breakfast when my sister called with the ne...

The West's Missed Opportunity

Friday, January 7 2:30 am

1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe by Mary Elise Sarotte �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher It�s been more than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we still can�t agree on how it happened. One general approach is to give some credit to American policy, and in particular Ronald Reagan�s famous �tear down this wall� speech, for creating conditions that weakened the East German regime and thereby empowered the East German people. Mary Elise Sarotte�s 1989, however, ...

Darwin's Camera

Thursday, January 6 1:05 am

Charles Darwin lived and worked in what Phillip Prodger calls �a time of profound transition in visual culture.� The relatively new technology of photography was becoming a tool of scientific inquiry, and Darwin, Prodger argues in Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, used it well, changing the way photographs were seen and used. The father of evolutionary theory was exacting in his choice of images and engravings for his groundbreaking work in, among other books, The ...

Cleo Paskal on the Global Warming Wars

Wednesday, January 5 1:04 am

Cleo Paskal calls herself a �recovering journalist.� After years as a foreign correspondent, Paskal, now an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and author of Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map, began to see through her reporting three major shifts: geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geophysical. �The first two were relatively well-covered. We all know about the rise of Asia and the financial crisis,� ...

Los Angeles Writers on Their City

Monday, January 3 11:26 pm

Tens of thousands of bibliophiles crowded last month's International Book Fair in Guadalajara, where Los Angeles was the guest of honor. Between panel discussions on the city's literary culture � including two hosted by Z�calo � we caught up with writerly Angelenos like Gary Phillips, Luis Rodriguez, and Denise Hamilton to find out what they most love and hate about their city. *Video by Laura Villalpando. Photo by Dulce Vasquez. Music: "Eres Para Mi" by Julieta Venegas....

Colette LaBouff Atkinson Reads "Ghost Squad"

Sunday, December 29 11:54 pm

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 as Z�calo's poetry editor, selecting published and unpublished works to post here every week. Atkinson stopped by Z�calo's offices to read from her own collection of poems, Mean, published last year. ...

Kenneth Turan on The Greatest Story Ever Told

Friday, December 27 8:29 pm

Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, started to collect the material for Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told over two decades ago. He shared with Z�calo's Swati Pandey the story behind the story and why Joe Papp transformed theater. Q. Tell me the story behind the book. Why did it take so long to get to print? A. I signed the contract for this book in 1986. It was to be an oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival, put t...

Z�calo's Top Books of 2009

Saturday, December 21 12:02 am

It's that time of year, and Z�calo can't resist a Top 10 List. We're taking this week easy, but we did pull together our favorite books of the year from among those we reviewed, presented in judicious alphabetical order. (And below, a favorite poem, a favorite event, and staff interviews.) Happy holidays, happy New Year, and we hope you have some time for some reading. Bill Barich's A Pint of Plain Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark Kal Raustiala's Does the Constitution Follow the F...

Is Cool Dead?

Friday, December 14 12:51 am

Ted Gioia, author of The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, dropped by Z�calo's office to explain why the hip, ironic pose we�ve come to know as �coolness� is over, and earnestness is in. *Photo courtesy jorge.correa....

The New Yorker's Ken Auletta on Google

Sunday, November 30 11:32 pm

New Yorker media columnist Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, stopped by Z�calo to chat with Swati Pandey about whether Google is evil, whether information should be free, and what it means to be "Googled." *Photo courtesy mark knol. ...

Lost Buildings

Wednesday, November 20 1:20 am

In Lost Buildings, Jonathan Glancey compiles structures from ancient times to present day, some once real and some only imagined, that fell to war, commerce, natural disaster, or �fickle� architectural fashion. Buildings generally don�t succumb to old age, Glancey writes. We�re much more likely to knock them down ourselves, like �petulant children� playing with �a pile of wooden bricks in a nursery.� Photographs and essays travel from ancient civilizations to the World Trade Center to buildings ...

Viktor Mayer-Sch�nberger on the Virtues of Forgetting

Friday, November 16 1:56 am

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 we forget, argues Viktor Mayer-Sch�nberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. He stopped by Z�calo to chat with Swati Pandey about why forgetting is just as important as remembering, why the Internet makes it harder to forget, and what we might do about it. *Ph...

Oscar Garza Interviews Ned Sublette

Monday, November 12 12:21 am

Oscar Garza and Ned Sublette joined Z�calo for our conference, La Nueva Orleans? Race and Immigration in Post-Katrina America. Before the event began, the two sat down to chat about Sublette's latest, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans. Sublette explains how the book came to be, his relationship with New Orleans, and why New Orleans culture is still going strong. To read more about Sublette and Garza's discussions at the conference, click here. *Photo courtesy New Or...

Andre Perry

Sunday, October 20 5:10 pm

Andre Perry is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of New Orleans, Associate Dean of the College of Education and Human Development, and CEO of the UNO Charter Schools. Dr. Perry writes a newspaper column for the Louisiana Weekly on K-16 leadership and governance in Louisiana. His primary research interests are immigrant educational rights and migrant education. Read below to learn more about him. Q. What music have you listened to today? A. The Roots� live CD...

Lauren Weber on Why Cheap is a Bad Word

Monday, October 15 8:41 pm

Lauren Weber, author of In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue, stopped by Z�calo's offices to chat with Swati Pandey about how cheap became a bad word, whether there's such a thing as being too cheap, and the last time she indulged in an extravagant purchase. *Photo courtesy Woman of Scorn....

Lawrence Allen on Chocolate in China

Friday, October 6 12:24 am

Lawrence Allen gets part of the credit for bringing kisses to China � the chocolate kind. After several years working in Taiwan and Hong Kong on behalf of familiar brands � Schick, Listerine, Conair � Allen started working for Hershey. He brought the famous bite-size treat to the mainland before moving on to work for Nestle. His experience was the fodder for Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China's Consumers. He spoke with Swati Pandey of Z�calo on what ch...

Conrad Fischer on Americans and Doctors

Friday, September 27 10:38 pm

Dr. Conrad Fischer, author of Routine Miracles: Personal Journeys of Patients and Doctors Discovering the Powers of Modern Medicine, stopped by the Z�calo office to tell us how Americans feel about their doctors, how med students feel about becoming doctors, and why we should start considering our healthcare providers as heroes. ...

Haggai Ram on Iranophobia

Sunday, September 22 11:13 pm

Haggai Ram is a senior lecturer at Israel's Ben Gurion University, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East, and Iran and Israel in particular. And while he's sticking to his regional subject for his next work, he admits the subject matter is a bit far afield. "It might sound strange," he said, "but I'm now working on a book-length manuscript on the social history of pot in Israel and Palestine since the 1920s." Ram chatted with Swati Pandey of Z�calo about his latest, Iranophob...

Richard English on How to Handle Terrorism

Sunday, September 22 12:00 am

Richard English is a professor of political science who has been studying the Irish Republican Army since the mid-1980s. His latest book, Terrorism: How to Respond, considers terrorism with a broader lens. He chatted with Zocalo about lessons the U.S. might learn from the IRA example, and what optimists can say to pessimists who claim terrorism will always be with us. Q. What inspired you to write this book? A. What happened was after my book on the Irish Republican Army came out in 20...

Frank Bruni on Being Born Round

Sunday, September 16 10:27 am

As a food critic for the New York Times, Frank Bruni was, until August, one of the most feared and talked about men on the city's restaurant scene. His disguises (Warhol glasses and wigs), his dining companions (three guests who would pass plates between each other like clockwork), and his method of paying (custom-made American Express cards with pseudonyms) are all discussed in Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater. But mostly, Bruni's latest work is devoted to deeper and more com...

Where Underpants Come From

Monday, September 10 1:00 am

Where Underpants Come from: From Checkout to Cotton Field - Travels Through the New China by Joe Bennett �Reviewed by Adam Fleisher It is probably safe to say that most consumers are awed by how inexpensive everyday household items have become. Of course, a sense that stuff is cheap thanks to China is good enough for most of us � we don�t have a second thought about our discount shopping. But Joe Bennett is not most people. While perusing the underwear section in his local departme...

Mitch Horowitz on Occult America

Thursday, September 7 10:24 pm

Mitch Horowitz, a longtime publisher and editor, is the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, on which he�ll be speaking here in Los Angeles in early October. He chatted with Swati Pandey of Z�calo about what �occult� means, how it became tied to progressive political movements, and why, when it comes to religion, California has a lot in common with upstate New York. Q. What was the inspiration behind the book? A. I started to notice that peop...

Alex Jones on the Decline of the News

Friday, August 23 10:49 pm

Alex S. Jones covered the press for The New York Times from 1983-1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Jones is the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard�s Kennedy School of Government and he�s hosted NPR�s �On the Media� and PBS�s �Media Matters.� His most recent book is Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. Jones talked with Byron Perry for Z�calo about citizen journalism, partisan blogs, and the eroding �iro...

Lev Grossman reads The Magicians

Friday, August 23 9:26 pm

Lev Grossman's latest novel The Magicians centers on a brilliant, magic-obsessed teenager who discovers that the fantasy world of his favorite books is real. The novel hit The New York Times bestseller list last week, and The Washington Post and others have called it a smart and engrossing fairy tale for grown-ups. Grossman, a Time magazine technology writer, author of two other novels, and recent Z�calo guest, dropped by the Z�calo offices to read from his new work. ...

I Know a Man

Monday, August 13 1:02 am

by Robert Creeley As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,�John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ�s sake, look out where yr going. �from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975...

Sarah Garland on Suburban Gangs

Thursday, August 3 9:59 am

Sarah Garland has reported on crime, immigration, and education for The New York Times, Newsweek International, and The New York Sun. She spent the last five years working on Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America's Suburbs, a look at the rising Central American gang problem in Long Island. Garland�s research and reporting took her from Hempstead and Garden City on Long Island, to Los Angeles and El Salvador. But in her first book, she cho...

Golden Dreams

Thursday, July 31 10:00 am

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Americans and the California Dream) by Kevin Starr �Reviewed by Byron Perry California in the 1950s is collectively remembered as a collage of tailfins, swimming pools, and modernist architecture, a time when any hardworking sap could own a single-family home in the suburbs, complete with good schools and a mall to drive to on Saturdays. USC historian and former California state librarian Kevin Starr assiduously delves into...

How Do L.A. and Berlin Deal With Their Pasts?

Monday, July 16 2:00 am

Describing his impressions of Berlin�s rapid, sometimes unplanned and bottom-up redevelopment in the last two decades, architect Roger Sherman made an analogy apt, even uncomfortably so, for Los Angeles. �It�s something like a fire,� he said to the standing-room-only crowd at the Aedes Gallery in Berlin, at a Z�calo panel co-presented with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and�the West. Such development was, he added, more impressive than �any of the individual monuments, however...

Rob Spillman on African Writing

Friday, July 13 10:00 am

Rob Spillman, editor of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, compiled for the collection a diverse group of African authors from across the continent, including well-known writers like Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee and rising stars like Chimamanda Adichie and Laila Lalami. Spillman, editor and co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House and a writer himself, dropped by Z�calo's offices to discuss why African writers are having a moment in the sun. ...

Abe Lowenthal on Globalizing California

Thursday, July 6 10:00 am

According to Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, California shouldn't get too preoccupied with its current economic crisis, however pressing. "It is important to pay attention to the urgent, but it is equally vital to keep our eye on what�s going to be truly important in the 21st century," Lowenthal said. "The ability of Californians to understand and respond intelligently to the current environment is going to be very importan...

Love Song

Monday, June 18 11:00 am

by William Carlos Williams Sweep the house clean, hang fresh curtains in the windows put on a new dress and come with me! The elm is scattering its little loaves of sweet smells from a white sky! Who shall hear of us in the time to come? Let him say there was a burst of fragrance from black branches. �from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939...

Jon Jeter reads Flat Broke in the Free Market

Thursday, June 1 10:00 am

Jon Jeter stopped by Z�calo's offices to discuss his latest book, Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People. Below, he reads from a chapter in which he studies the impact of globalization on Americans. ...

Jon Jeter on Globalization

Wednesday, May 29 10:00 am

Jon Jeter dropped by Z�calo to discuss his new book, Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People. Jeter, formerly the Washington Post's bureau chief in South America and Southern Africa, explained why globalization has made many around the world worse off, and why endless cycles of boom and bust may not have to be the norm. ...

Winifred Gallagher on Paying Attention

Friday, May 18 10:00 am

Winifred Gallagher, author of House Thinking and The Power of Place, stopped by Z�calo's offices to discuss her latest book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, which argues that learning to focus on the right things can make for a more meaningful life. Below, Gallagher explains what attention is and why it's so crucial, and whether distractions and the devices that create them � smart phones, iPods � can ever be helpful. ...

Matthea Harvey

Sunday, May 13 10:00 am

Matthea Harvey, this year's winner of the Claremont Graduate University's Kingsley Tufts Award, is author of three books of poetry and a teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence. She stopped by Z�calo's offices to read from Modern Life, a New York Times Notable Book of 2008. To read the poem, follow the link below. Terror of the Future/1 If you had a talent for tealeaves, we put you in a tent and charged admission. Outside, people with syringes in their arms swayed sleepily in the s...

Andrei Codrescu reads The Posthuman Dada Guide

Saturday, May 12 3:30 pm

Andrei Codrescu, poet, novelist, essayist, and commentator for National Public Radio, dropped by Z�calo�s offices to chat about his latest book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess. Below, Codrescu reads an excerpt on where artistic originality comes from, and how to pronounce his name. ...

Famine

Saturday, May 12 10:11 am

Famine: A Short History by Cormac � Gr�da Those who have suffered famines have more vivid terms for them. The Irish called 1740 to 1741 �the year of the slaughter.� The Indians named a 1790 shortage the �skulls famine.� The Kenyans described famine as �the scramble,� and in southern Africa, in the early 19th century, one famine was referred to as the Madhlatule, translated as, �eat what you can, and say nothing.� Wide-ranging details like these fill Cormac � Gr�da�s Famine, a loaded, hea...

Matthew Dickman

Friday, May 11 2:37 pm

Matthew Dickman, this year's winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his poetry collection, All American Poem, dropped by the Z�calo offices to read a couple poems. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker. To read the poem, follow the link below. Lents District Whenever I return a fight breaks out in the park, someone buys a lottery ticket, steals a bottle of vodka, lights a cigarette underneath the overpass. 205 rips the...

Andrei Codrescu on Dada

Sunday, May 7 11:01 am

Andrei Codrescu, poet, novelist, essayist, and commentator for National Public Radio, dropped by Z�calo's offices en route to speak at Aloud about his latest book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess. Codrescu, author of 40 books and founder of the literary journal "Exquisite Corpse", explains what exactly it means to be posthuman and live the dada way, and how readers should approach his playful, strange, sharp little book. ...

Orson Welles

Saturday, May 6 10:00 am

Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, and directed his most acclaimed film, Citizen Kane, at age 26. Years later, after a couple disastrous movies and a sojourn in Europe, he would reunite with one of its stars, Joseph Cotten, in The Third Man. Welles' character, Harry Lime, is the missing center of the movie until he appears, finally, and explains his motives for entering a less-than-savory line of work. To a famous speech set against a memorable backdrop, Welles added a line about the Sw...

Matthew Dickman

Thursday, May 4 2:20 pm

Matthew Dickman, this year's winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his poetry collection, All American Poem, dropped by the Z�calo offices to read a couple poems. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker. [kml_flashembed fversion="8.0.0" movie="http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/video/10_minutes/mathew_love.swf" targetclass="flashmovie" publishmethod="static" width="320" height="280"] [/kml_flashembed] To read the...

Michelle Goldberg on The Means of Reproduction

Monday, April 22 10:09 am

Bestselling author Michelle Goldberg came by Z�calo's offices while she was in Los Angeles to speak at Aloud. Her latest book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, explores the global status of women, particularly their reproductive rights. Below, she discusses what the Cold War had to do with feminism, where the movement stands today, and what the left and the right won't talk about when it comes to women's rights. ...

Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai's Life as an Activist

Sunday, April 21 5:00 am

In the mid-1970s, as she set out to launch the Green Belt Movement � developing communities by planting trees � Wangari Maathai faced an environmentally strained land, an impoverished population and a government plagued with lack of resources, inexperience, and corruption. But the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and author of The Challenge for Africa pointed out a more basic obstacle. �Traditionally we did not plant trees. God did,� she joked with the packed audience at the UCLA Fowler Museum....

Stephen Mitchell on the Art of Translation

Saturday, March 23 11:55 am

Renowned translator and writer Stephen Mitchell, author of The Second Book of the Tao, was in town last week to give a talk at Aloud L.A. He stopped by the Z�calo offices to discuss his latest, and why translating a new work is a bit like becoming enamored with a new woman. ...

Is Higher Education Only for the Rich?

Monday, March 19 5:00 am

With college counselors, test-prep courses, tutors, application consultants and strong secondary educations at their disposal, wealthy students have a leg up when applying to college. Stuart Silverstein, a former higher education reporter for the Los Angeles Times, quoted one college president who put it more bluntly: �There has never been a better time to be a smart, rich kid. And in some schools, you don�t have to be as smart as before.� Silverstein hosted a panel featuring Los Angeles ...

James Mann on Ronald Reagan's Rebellion

Saturday, March 17 9:00 am

James Mann, author of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War, stopped by our offices to discuss his book, and why the conservative icon has more in common with Barack Obama than George W. Bush. ...

Are We in an Age of Rage?

Sunday, March 5 5:00 am

As a writer for Time magazine, Lev Grossman is all too familiar with the phenomenon of angry Internet comments, even if it takes some time to decode them. �It took me weeks just to find someone who could tell me what the words meant,� he joked with the audience at The Actors� Gang. �They were so extreme I�d never heard them before.� Dick Meyer, editorial director of digital media for NPR and author of Why We Hate Us, had a tip for him: �They probably refer to one or two basic physical ...

Theodore Lowi on Barack Obama

Wednesday, February 27 11:19 am

Theodore J. Lowi, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University and former president of the American Political Science Association, has long studied the presidency. One of the things he has learned in that process is that he would never want the job. �I may be the only American capable of being president of the United States because I have the wisdom to turn it down if it were offered to me,� he said. �I understand the impossibility of that office.� Read on to see w...

Bill Bratton

Thursday, February 3 2:51 pm

William J. Bratton was born and raised in Boston, in a working class family that �didn�t have a great deal of money, but there was always a contentment to our lives. We didn�t realize how little we had. Nobody else had anything either.� But Bratton did have books, particularly an illustrated children�s text, Your Police, and the novel The Commissioner, both of which convinced him, at the ripe age of 10, that he wanted to be Police Commissioner of New York. It was, he said, �kind of far-fetch...

Bill Bratton Turns Around His New Town

Thursday, February 3 2:00 am

What does a turnaround artist do when the turnaround is done? Los Angeles Garment and Citizen editor Jerry Sullivan posed that question to Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton at L.A�s Central Public Library, pondering if perhaps the Scotland Yard would be an option. �If they call, I�m gone. Sorry,� Bratton said without any hesitation, as he answered all his questions. But for now, he�s in Los Angeles, and he visited Z�calo to discuss his work here, how the police department ...

Amy Chua

Thursday, January 30 12:54 pm

Amy Chua has lived all across the country � growing up in the Midwest and on the West Coast, teaching in the South, and attending school and currently living in the Northeast, with her husband, two daughters, and two Samoyeds. She seems to have found her home, in an eccentric house in New Haven with �faces carved into columns.� �This is going to sound terrible,� she said jokingly, �but I like the East Coast. I like the pace. It�s more suited to my personality.� Below, Chua, author of Day ...

Laura Zigman

Wednesday, January 23 9:53 am

Laura Zigman has come full circle. The novelist grew up in a suburb of Boston and never thought she�d leave. When she did, she spent 16 years in New York and Washington D.C. before surprising herself by moving back home. �I was the least likely person to move home,� she said. �I was really miserable growing up there.� She now lives there with her husband and eight-year-old son and so far thinks �it�s turned out better than I thought.� Read more about her likes and dislikes below. Q. What...

Robin D.G. Kelley

Tuesday, January 22 11:35 am

Robin D.G. Kelley was born in Harlem in 1962, where he spent the first nine years of his life �in the midst of a cultural and political revolution. That�s the only way to put it.� His school had a strong Black Panther Party presence, and he witnessed at a very young age the Harlem riots and later, from New York City, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the man whose legacy he discussed at Z�calo. Below, he told us more of his early life and present passions. Q. What do you wake up to...

Louis Chude-Sokei

Sunday, January 20 3:34 pm

Louis Chude-Sokei was born in Nigeria, spent his early childhood in Jamaica, and moved to Los Angeles after that. �I�m still working out how I�ve taken to America,� he said. �Much of my work is about how I�ve taken to America and whether I�ve taken to it.� And though his subject and inspiration may come from that move to the U.S., Chude-Sokei always knew what work he wanted to do. �There�s a family story about how I was writing books before I knew how to write,� he said, scribbling in the ai...

Matt Miller

Monday, January 15 3:39 pm

When his wife had job offers in New York and Los Angeles, Matt Miller, a New York native, urged her to pick Los Angeles. As he tells it, �The joke in the family is I dragged her across the country for her job.� That was 1995, and the two �never looked back.� Below, Miller, host of KCRW�s Left, Right & Center, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, reflects on some East Coast memories and his life in L.A. Q. What do you wake up to? A. We ...

Paul Vandeventer

Monday, January 15 2:42 pm

Paul Vandeventer was born in Altadena but lived in various spots, as his family followed the aerospace industry. Since 1975, however, the president of Community Partners has stuck to Southern California, and currently resides in Eagle Rock. He answered one of our tougher questions � describe yourself in five words or fewer � faster than anyone we've interviewed. See his answer to that question and others below. Q. What do you wake up to? A. Coffee. Q. What is your favorite word? A....

How Will Non-Profits Survive?

Sunday, January 14 5:00 am

It�s not easy being a non-profit. Moderator Paul Vandeventer, president of Community Partners, launched Z�calo�s panel on non-profit survival during the economic crisis with sobering statistics, while many in the full house jotted notes: Private foundations have seen their portfolios sink by 30 to 40%. Forty-four states are facing budget shortfalls, and half of them are planning cuts in social services and healthcare. One estimate predicts up to 10 million Americans will fall below the po...

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric

Friday, January 7 3:04 pm

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript text by Bob Dylan photographs by Barry Feinstein The seemingly endless excavation of Bob Dylan material continues with Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, which contains 23 Dylan poems written as accompaniment to handsome photos by Barry Feinstein. The poems � though Dylan hesitates to call them that in his included interview � riff on Feinstein�s photos of Hollywood�s funerals and award shows, its weary stars, discarded props, beaten landmarks, and underem...

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Wednesday, December 25 8:00 am

Have yourself a merry little Christmas Let your heart be light Next year all our troubles will be out of sight Have yourself a merry little Christmas Make the yule-tide gay Next year all our troubles will be miles away Once again as in olden days Happy golden days of yore Faithful friends who were dear to us Will be near to us once more Someday soon, we all will be together If the Fates allow Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow So have yourself a ...

December 12

Wednesday, December 12 12:13 pm

Z�calo Field Producer Laura Villalpando photographed these murals and altars in Los Angeles. �The most complex and original creation of New Spain was not individual but collective, not an artistic but a religious creation: The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. If the fecundity of a society is measured by the richness of its mythical images, New Spain was very fecund....�She was a true apparition, in the sense of the divine numen: a constellation of signs come from all the skies and ...

Obama's Energy Pick

Monday, December 10 4:32 pm

It's Steven Chu, according to a report on the Swamp, and he will be officially nominated tomorrow. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he has steered research to address climate change. With Chu's nomination, Barack Obama answered two requests from recent Z�calo guests John Emerson, Maria Echaveste and Rudy deLeon: to nominate an energy secretary who is strong on new energy sources, and to nominate a cabinet member from California. He...

Dana Gioia on reading

Saturday, December 9 3:52 pm

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced recently that he would leave his post to return to poetry, and the Aspen Institute. During his six-year tenure, Gioia built support and funding for the NEA, as he discussed during his February visit to Z�calo. We just posted a brief clip from his visit, during which he discusses why reading matters (the subject of one oft-commented upon NEA study): His full talk is available here, and worth watching (or listening)....

It Was A Very Good Year

Thursday, December 7 6:14 pm

Several Z�calo guests made the critics' best books roster during this annual time of reflection and list-making. The Washington Post picked Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money and Peter Gosselin's High Wire among their handful of business book selections, along with Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure, authored with Philip Gourevitch, and Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold. (Ferguson also made the Financial Times' list.) The New York Times chose Anne Enright's collection Yesterday's Weat...

Immigration and the Changing Picture of California

Tuesday, December 5 5:00 am

Talking about the relationship between immigrants and the Californian landscape, moderator Bob Sipchen told the audience at the Getty Center, is a bit like talking about how birds get along with the sky. �It was almost redundant,� said Sipchen, editor of Sierra magazine. �They are inexorably linked.� But Sipchen and the panelists � UC San Diego�s Nayan Shah, Brown University�s Matthew Garcia, and Getty Center fellow Ken Gonzales-Day � told a more complex story, of waves of migrant labo...

Tom Daschle's Plan for Healthcare

Monday, November 19 10:54 pm

President-elect Barack Obama tapped former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle for his Health and Human Services Secretary today, and Daschle is reported to have accepted. If his appointment is confirmed, Daschle will be at the center of the healthcare reform that Obama has vowed to pursue. Daschle has his own ideas about how to change the system, as he outlined in a Z�calo lecture in March. Below is a summary of and a link to a recording of his talk. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Das...

Reihan Salam's Plan to Change the GOP

Thursday, October 30 5:00 am

Reihan Salam is not a typical Republican. He's not white. He doesn't drive. He's from Brooklyn. And he loves Los Angeles. "I'm a really awful Republican," he confessed to the crowd at the Los Angeles Central Library. But his black sheep status didn't stop him from expounding on why his party is losing voters and what it can do to win them back. The consumption compromise Salam, an associate editor of The Atlantic and an author, began by probing what Republicans take for granted: the...

Economic Gangsters Rule Poor Countries

Tuesday, October 29 5:00 am

Why are some countries doing so well economically and others failing? It's a deceptively simple question � one that Edward Miguel, a UC Berkeley economist and co-author of "Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations," examined on October 28 at the Goethe Institut in Los Angeles. Miguel sketches out the opposing battle formations of the economic development debate: The camp that believes poor countries need significant capital investment to ever make it out of pov...

Paul Krugman Explains What Exactly Went Wrong

Friday, October 25 5:00 am

When Paul Krugman held the floor at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, he became Z�calo's first guest to require a strictly policed door. He was also Z�calo's first guest capable of discussing what it feels like to win a Nobel Prize. "Nothing exercises me too much in the last couple weeks" since his win, Krugman said. This year's economics winner � also a New York Times columnist and professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Relations � sp...

Gustavo Arellano's OC

Tuesday, October 22 5:00 am

Gustavo Arellano knows what Orange County is about � and isn�t afraid to place blame. "We codified our beauty in orange carton labels � wonderful paintings, art-deco style, of orange groves,� the author and columnist said at a Z�calo lecture at the Actors' Gang in Culver City last night. �We never show the Mexicans who are picking the oranges." He added, �Hating Mexicans � that�s a true Orange County religion.� Arellano has long been a translator of all things Mexican to the people ...

Philippe Claudel's 'I've Loved You So Long'

Monday, October 15 2:56 pm

Z�calo presented Philippe Claudel's directorial debut, "I've Loved You So Long" in Hollywood at the Harmony Gold Theatre last night, October 14th. Claudel's film is a stark portrayal of one woman's emancipation, both from literal prison and the walls she has herself built to survive unimaginable pain. As the director explained during the post-screening discussion with Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum, "the great lesson in the story is the discovery of the importance of other [people]....

Knock knock...Nobel Calling

Sunday, October 14 5:03 pm

[caption id="attachment_72" align="alignleft" width="319" caption="The Newist Nobelist"][/caption] A week after putting American fiction in its place, Sweden's Nobel Committee has awarded the prize in Economic Sciences to one of America's most popular public intellectuals, Paul Krugman, Princeton scholar and New York Times columnist. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says the win comes "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity," which might explain why you can fi...

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