Check Out the New Zócalo

An Ideas Exchange With a Head and a Heart

Nearly 10 years ago, in April 2003, Zócalo Public Square started presenting smart, fun, free events and receptions around Los Angeles.

Four years ago, we started publishing smart, fun, free articles to turn our events into a bigger conversation.

Last year, we brought on four accomplished editors to expand our web presence and take us to the next level.

Today, we’re throwing it all together and reinventing ourselves as an Ideas Exchange, a seamless and innovative blend of live events and digital humanities journalism.

Our mission hasn’t changed—we are still committed to building community by humanizing and sharing ideas, and to bringing together the broadest possible audiences.

What is new is our carefully curated, integrated approach to events and journalism, and a beautiful new website that allows us to better highlight our many features.

Our new format should signal to everyone that after nearly 10 years of existence we here at Zócalo are doubling down and investing in our future.

By the end of December, we will have presented 70 events in 11 cities and published over 600 articles in 2012. Outside of Los Angeles, we have hosted programs in Phoenix, Fresno, Bakersfield, Tucson, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Washington, D.C. Here in L.A., we are proud to call many of the city’s finest cultural institutions our partners.

Our goal is to create—day after day—an eclectic, serendipitous, accessible, generous, civilized refuge for ideas, where you can escape the suffocating, which-side-are-you-on narrowness of so much of contemporary political and intellectual life.

All of us here at Zócalo are committed to asking fundamental, visceral questions about the complicated issues facing our world. We’re not trying to be clever, hip, or seductively oblique and exclusive. What we’re after is that rare combination of intellectual clarity and human touch. We’re looking for the connection between head and heart, big ideas and real-life experience.

We invite you to check out our new website. If you like what you see, we invite you to come back tomorrow and the next day.

Gregory Rodriguez is publisher and founding director of Zócalo Public Square. He wishes to thank The Ahmanson Foundation for underwriting the redesign and development of Zócalo’s new website.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido, The Fowler Museum at UCLA.

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