Zócalo Public Square

Most people agree that California’s political system is broken, and experts say one major hurdle to fixing it is citizens’ disengagement. The voter registration rate is among the lowest in the country, and just one-third of residents report talking about politics at least a few times a week – putting the state 46th nationwide. Zócalo presents a panel of experts including Pete Peterson, executive director of Pepperdine's Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership; political scientist R. Michael Alvarez; education professor and founder of UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access John Rogers; and Alliance For Innovation president Karen Thoreson to discuss why Californians don't talk about politics, and what can be done about it

Poverty and low social status have long been shown to correlate with shorter lives among many groups of Americans. The inequities have important consequences for California and the nation as a whole, but what can we do about it? Zócalo presents a panel including Larry Adelman, creator and executive producer of the documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?; Tony Iton, senior vice president for healthy communities at The California Endowment; and urban planner Ryan Snyder to discuss what these challenges mean for California's future and how we can solve them in a way that improves health outcomes and the quality of life for everyone.

Humans rely on trees for oxygen and food, but also shade and beauty, creating a tension that imbues the relationship with meaning. Trees are part of every aspect of human life and are amply represented in literature, music and art. Farmer David "Mas" Masumoto, artist Jennifer Steinkamp and environmental studies professor Nadlini Nadkarni discuss the many facets of that connection in a panel moderated by Sierra Magazine editor Bob Sipchen at the Getty Center.

Many scholars and activists have raised alarms about the world getting worse, but economist Charles Kenny disagrees. In his new book Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding -- And How We Can Improve the World Even More, Kenny catalogs several measures -- literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality and more -- that have improved globally. Kenny visits Zócalo to discuss his research and argue that the world isn't as bad as we fear.

Gandhi's impact on his native India is unquestioned, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld argues the Mahatma's biographers have not sufficiently explored how his 21 years in South Africa shaped his philosophies and strategies. Lelyvled, the former executive editor of The New York Times and author of the new book Great Soul, visits Zócalo to discuss what Gandhi learned in South Africa and how he applied it back home.

When a neighbor killed his wife and himself in 2000, Peter Lovenheim decided he needed to get to know the people living around him. He started with meetings at Starbucks and moved up to spending a night at each of their homes. The result was his book In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, which was chosen as the winner of Zócalo Public Square's first annual book prize. Lovenheim visited Zócalo to discuss his project and what he learned about good neighbors.

Journalist and author Doug Saunders has spent years studying what he calls "arrival cities" -- the ramshackle neighborhoods on the outskirts of the world's biggest cities that are often the place new immigrants land. Arrival cities are often kept down by physical and bureaucratic barriers, he says, but their residents' drive to succeed makes the neighborhoods valuable to the urban area at large. Saunders visits Zócalo to discuss the arrival cities -- including those in Los Angeles, Istanbul, Cairo and many other urban centers and the challenges and opportunities they pose.

Less than 70 years after the official end of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China, Chinese American culture is all around us. Yet many of the leading examples -- from the the Charlie Chan detective novels of the 1920s to Amy Tan's bestseller The Joy Luck Club and Bruce Lee movies -- are insufficient to capture the full Chinese-American experience. Historian Mae Ngai moderates a Zócalo panel about efforts to tell those stories over the years. Panelists include University of California at Santa Barbara English professor Yunte Huang; Suellen Cheng, curator of El Pueblo Historical Monument in downtown Los Angeles; and Franklin Odo, former director of the Asian Pacific American program at the Smithsonian.

Neither hard power nor soft power will be the key to winning the race for prosperity or global influence tomorrow. Rather, says, Joseph Nye, author of The Future of Power, successful nations will deploy “smart power.” President Obama's decisions on Libya are a good example of smart power, he says. Nye joins Zócalo to discuss how power balances have changed in the global age, as new nations take their place among the most influential and non-state actors become a larger part of the conversation.

James Gleick, biographer, author and journalist, discusses his latest book on Information Theory entitled The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Yale Law School professor John Fabian Witt tells the hidden story of how in 1847 and 1848, on the road from Veracruz to Mexico City, the United States army invented the concept of the war crime as we know it today.

Award-winning writer, Susan Jacoby, most recently the author of Never Say Die: the Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2011), discussed the uncensored realities of growing old with an audience at The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. As the youngest baby boomers turn 65 this year, Jacoby warned that clinging to false hope about the future of aging leaves us unprepared to deal with the financial and medical woes destined to afflict the swelling ranks of the elderly.

Evgeny Morozov is a Stanford visiting scholar, Net Effect blogger, and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. He visited Zócalo to lecture on the ways authoritarian regimes manipulate New Media, noting trends in Iran, Egypt, China and even the United States.

Artist Shengtian Zheng, USC School of Architecture Dean Qingyun Ma and New York-Shangai-based artist Wenda Gu share a panel at the Getty Center to discuss the "New China", and the ruins of the old. Moderator Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, set up the evening as a historical narrative, weaving together politics and artistry to approach the issue.

games, and how to harness humanity’s creative potential for global improvement. Her new book is called Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011).

“The same idea in your head can be represented along with its contradiction.” At least that’s what Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, believes. Kurzban is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He joins Zocalo to explore the psychological causes of hypocricy, focusing on the specialized mind and the evolutionary benefits of ignorance.

As the Superintendent of Finance for the rebel American government, Robert Morris instituted debt financing as the best means to pay for the costs of fighting the Revolution. But he was challenged by the refusal of many Americans to pay taxes. How can the U.S. pay for its policies without losing the support of Americans? Charles Rappleye, author of Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution, visits Zócalo to explore the life of a man who shaped the financial system during the Revolution, and the significance of his work in our current economic climate.

An Evening with Guillermo del Toro

For every commissioned piece of public art there are countless unlawful works — scrawled spray-painted initials, cheeky visual pranks, massive murals soaring up buildings and across rail cars, shrines tucked into unused corners. Street artists have become figures of global recognition, even acceptance. Artist collectives in Berlin take over buildings; London-based Banksy puts on pop-up exhibits around the world and debuted a film at Sundance; Shepard Fairey papered the U.S. with his Andre the Giant sticker campaign and went on to create a much-copied campaign poster for Barack Obama. But street artists also remain the subject of controversy, forcing cities to consider what art is acceptable, who should be allowed to create it, and where. In conjunction with the Fowler Museum's exhibition of Larry Yust’s photographs of street art in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris, Zócalo invited arts writer Jori Finkel, Fowler Museum curator Patrick Polk, Aaron Rose, co-curator of MOCA’s forthcoming street art exhibit, street

From a Persian queen’s brutal mastectomy in the fifth century BC to the 19th century recipients of primitive chemotherapy, humans have long tried to beat cancer. But even as we routed other scourges like cholera and tuberculosis, launched ambitious public health campaigns, exposed the dangers of chemicals like nicotine, and survived ever more rigorous treatment regimens, cancer remained as deadly and mysterious as ever. Cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, visited Zócalo to tell stories of a disease we’ve lived with, died from, and tried to conquer for thousands of years—and what it was like to write about it.