From Zócalo Public Square

  • Connecting California

    Zócalo is celebrating its 20th birthday! As part of the festivities, we’re publishing reflections and responses that revisit and reimagine some of our most impactful stories and public programs. Connecting California columnist Joe Mathews revisits Southern California author D.J. Waldie’s 2012 essay “The Darkness Behind Huell Howser” and considers why, over a decade after Howser’s death, the public TV’s great California chronicler retains such a hold on us. “Do you know Huell Howser?” I got that...

  • Who Is Shakespeare For?

    “What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?” These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as...

  • from Decorporeal by Anthony Sutton

      After many hours on the road:    Indiana and the Hell is real billboard. I stopped    in Bloomington needing food. The sky    so blue Yves Klein could have painted it.    I was impressed by all the organic food places,    decided to crash for the night,    find a quick Airbnb, load my stuff and check out    the town. The Back Door, the one gay bar,    caught my attention– Anarchist Dance Party,    tonight!–in the dimly lit patio I picked up    some DIY zines about decolonization,    thumbed...

  • How Do We Disagree in the Public Square?

    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...

  • The Genius Mexican Composer History Forgot

    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 feels immediate—sweeping, dreamy, and above all, supremely sure-footed. Every note is both rooted and soaring, coaxing even the wallflowers to dance and sway. It is easily on par with his contemporary Johann Strauss Jr.’s masterwork “The Blue Danube”—to the point that Strauss Jr. is often mistakenly credited with having composed...

  • A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War

    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 Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our...

  • Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature?

    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 Kings Canyon National Parks. Around the same time, the National Park Service announced that it aimed to invoke the Wilderness Act to limit the use of fixed anchors on Yosemite’s iconic big wall climbs. How did a law created 60 years ago to protect nature in undeveloped areas come to do something else...

  • We Shall Rest by Sheila Black

      The elm split by lightening stands above the bench where my father sat the summer he could no longer breathe enough to walk to the Avalon without stopping. I sat next to him, a little bored, a little tired of his child-like need—his insistence on walking even when he could not walk. In the film, we watched that day, a group of actors are rehearsing a play. The star runs through his lines in the car in which he is driven to and fro from his hotel to the provincial but charming theater. He is a...

  • Will Young Americans Finally Rock the Vote?

    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 to cast a ballot, I became fascinated with the potential and obstacles facing our youngest voters. I delved into the lengthy and messy midcentury struggle to pass the 26th Amendment, extending the franchise to 18-year-olds. The first bill to lower the voting age was introduced in Congress during World War II—why should young...

  • Reading Animal Farm in Zimbabwe

    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 formed opposition party that he silenced its supporters. In the years since, writers and independent media have repeatedly turned to Animal Farm as a way to illuminate our political reality—even after Mugabe’s 2017 ousting. Last year, a group of Zimbabwean writers published the first-ever Shona...