Michelle Wilde Anderson Wins the 2023 Zócalo Book Prize

The Fight to Save the Town Highlights the Work of Sewing Society Back Together

Michelle Wilde Anderson is the winner of the 2023 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America.

Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. Our 12 previous winners—a mix of distinguished historians, social scientists, journalists, and public thinkers—include Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, Jia Lynn Yang, and, most recently, Heather McGhee. Anderson is a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at …

Interview by Sarah Rothbard | March 29, 2023

A Letter From Northern Michigan, Where Remote Is Not Remote Enough to Escape COVID

A Professor Who Finds a Home in the Upper Peninsula No Longer Has the Heart to Return to the Classroom

by James McCommons | September 3, 2020

Last winter, I felt pressure and spasms beneath my breastbone and went in for a cardiac stress test. Two days later, I left the hospital with a stent in the …

Capturing the Architecture of American Agriculture—and a Passing Way of Life

For 45 Years, David Hanks Has Photographed Feed Mills in Every Season and Mood

By David Hanks | August 24, 2017

“Why would anyone want to take pictures of a place like this?”

That’s the question I often get when I enter the office of a feed mill or grain elevator, …

Skip the Auto Plant, Obama and Mitt

Cars Aren’t Detroit’s Future—Or Even Its Present

by Darrell Dawsey | February 26, 2012

We hear so much about presidential candidates–and so little about life in the states that elect them. In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the trail and give us …

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