Our Favorite Essays of 2022

From Behind Prison Walls to a Container Ship Out at Sea to the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, Zócalo’s Contributors Traversed the World to Report on the Human Condition

In 2022, Zócalo’s contributors reported from the front lines of a changing world, looking to foster conversation—and curiosity—about the way we live now.

While selecting just 10 essays from the scores we’ve published this year is no easy task, the ones we’ve highlighted below reflect the best of Zócalo’s special, eclectic blend of ideas journalism with a head and heart. From a first-hand account of incarceration, to a case for how the global fight against authoritarianism can begin in your backyard, to even why, when feeling adrift, one might consider passage by …

December 29, 2022

Where I Go: A Big, Slow-Moving Boat

Aboard a Container Ship, I Found the Courage to Navigate Toward a New Future

by Elena Legeros | June 15, 2022

May 2013: CMA CGM Dalila, offshore of Yokohama, Japan

The flat sea glimmers like a disco ball and it’s warm enough to sit outside without a puffy coat. All day long …

Thanks for Being Obsessed with Us, America

This Holiday Season, Be Grateful to Your Out-of-State Friends and Relatives Who Have California on the Brain

by JOE MATHEWS | November 23, 2021

Thank you, America, for always keeping California in your thoughts.

Now it’s that time of the year when we should give thanks for the only California real estate that’s still cheap—all …

It’s Time to Embrace the Vaccine Passport

There Shouldn’t Be Any Controversy Around This Crucial Public Good

by Peter Baldwin | May 5, 2021

Vaccine passports, and the questions of whether governments or private businesses can or should require people to show them, have recently inspired controversy, and much misinformation, in many countries.

Some …

Where I Go: Visiting Mushakraj, a Rodent Icon in Kathmandu

A Gilt-Metal Rat Carries the Powers of the God, and the Weight of Tragedy and Centuries

by Ed Douglas | April 15, 2021

The city seemed like a mushroom, a cement mycelium inserting itself into new corners of the valley, fragmenting blocks of countryside and then flooding in like a gray tide to …

Where I Go: Transiting Los Angeles

We've Learned to See Our City Anew—One Route at a Time

by Janeth Estevez and John Perry | April 7, 2021

Long before we started a travel blog, transit was what brought us together. We met as coworkers at an art museum in Los Angeles, and after work we’d take the …

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