Beyoncé’s Dance Floor Liberation
From the Golden Age of House to ‘Break My Soul,’ Black Divas Continue to Lift Us Up in Hard Times
I can very clearly remember in 1993 the first time I heard Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” I felt moved ...
I can very clearly remember in 1993 the first time I heard Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” I felt moved ...
We never heard about “recycling” when I grew up, during the Age of Plastics. But, during one summer ...
Send help, Harry Potter! Sacramento needs a new wizard! Ana Matosantos has announced she is departing ...
California’s San Joaquin Valley is a place of contradictions: It is the most agriculturally productive region in the world ...
Merced is a place for dreams and new beginnings. At least that’s how it was advertised to me when I moved there from the Bay Area to attend college at the University of California’s newest outpost, a campus intended to serve the Central Valley and invigorate the local economy. If the pursuit of an education brought me there, places like the Cinema Café—a restaurant nestled into the historic Mainzer Theater building—were what made me feel at home.
The café closed just before the pandemic, a victim of Merced’s own success. Ever since, it has been a specter—a ghost of the Merced I had known and a reminder of progress’s voracious appetite.
I didn’t have any expectations the first time I visited the eatery, for a Saturday brunch, after I moved off campus in 2016. But as my friends and I walked up to it, I was instantly charmed. It was a light-green building with art-deco features ...
More than 230 amphitheaters, among the largest and most memorable monuments left to us by the Romans, survive in cities from northern England to the banks of the Jordan River. The Romans built amphitheaters for more than 500 years in a range of sizes—from a capacity of a few thousand to 50,000 in the Colosseum—using a variety of techniques. The amphitheater at Pompeii was built in the first century BCE by workers who excavated hillsides, placed terraced seating on the packed soil, and erected retaining walls to hold the rows of seats in place. The amphitheater in Bordeaux was built nearly 300 years later as a freestanding oval fashioned out of brick, concrete, and cut stone.
In every one of these diverse structures, the proximity of one’s seat to the arena floor corresponded to one’s social standing in the community. That method of letting status determine seating is having a rebirth today ...
With wars playing a crucial role throughout history in shaping American influence and character—and with present-day conflicts devastating countries such as Ukraine and Yemen—Zócalo convened a panel to probe the question, “What is Our Responsibility for Our Government’s Wars?” ...