Ideas

How Do We Disagree in the Public Square?

Those Who Study and Work to Keep Civil Discourse Civil Share the ‘Secret Sauce’ for Productive Debate

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective hopes. Ideally, the public square provides room to solve the problems we face. It is also where new, thorny issues often arise.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of Zócalo’s editorial and events series spotlighting the ideas, places, and questions that have shaped the public square that Zócalo has created over the past 20 years.

For this fifth and final installment, we pulled in …

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The Genius Mexican Composer History Forgot

Uncovering Juventino Rosas, Whose Waltz Took the World By Storm But Whose Story Remains a Mystery

by Oliver Mayer |

Juventino Rosas’ waltz “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves) is perhaps the most famous song of its generation. Now, more than 130 years after it was written, the tune still …

A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War

‘Civil War’ Offers A Vision of California Fighting the U.S. That Matches Foreign Propaganda—and Misses the Point

by Joe Mathews |

The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was …

Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature?

The Landmark 1964 Law Is Now Preventing Effective Land Management and Critical Climate Research

by Daniel T. Blumstein and Thomas B. Smith |

At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and …

Will Young Americans Finally Rock the Vote?

After Decades of Research, We Know How to Get New People to the Polls. We Just Don’t Always Do It

by Jane Eisner |

Twenty years ago, I published Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy. The book grew out of a personal passion: Once my oldest child was able …

Reading Animal Farm in Zimbabwe

From Minority White Rule to Dictatorship and Beyond, Orwell’s 1945 Novel—Now in a New Translation—Has Proved Prescient

by Beaven Tapureta |

I began to notice Animal Farm references proliferating in Zimbabwe in 2008.

That was the year hyperinflation nosedived the economy, and long-time leader Robert Mugabe felt threatened enough by a newly …


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