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• What Makes a Great California Idea?

  California has been Tomorrowland since long before Walt Disney opened the theme park version—and its greatest inventions have changed the world for the better. But its government often seems stuck in the past. And the Capitol’s dominant interests are more focused on maintaining their current power than investing in big, California-grown ideas—which appear to be more perilous than promising.

  Does this state still have the stomach—not to mention ambition, educated populace, and political will—to enact big ideas? XPRIZE Foundation CEO Anousheh Ansari, Public Policy Institute of California president and CEO and retired Chief Justice of California Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, and founding director of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace California Center Ian Klaus visit Zócalo at the CalMatters Ideas Festival to discuss the state of new ideas in the Golden State. Moderated by Zócalo’s California columnist & democracy editor Joe Mathews.

• Essay

  A Yearbook to Remember

  We Can’t Hold Time in Our Hands, But We’ll Always Have Signed Messages, Funny Photos, and “Most Likely to …”

  by Milissa Joi

  I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year …

• Essay

  How Two Chicana Nerds Wrote Their Way Back to Oxnard

  Michele Serros and I Did Everything We Could to Escape Our SoCal Hometown—Only to Find It Lived Within Us

  by Cristina Herrera

  Growing up as a Chicana nerd, I never thought I’d write a book about myself, much less about Oxnard …

• The Takeaway

  What If We Saw Cars Like Rolling Sculptures?

  The Automobile Represents an Engine of Possibility for Black L.A., Said Panelists at “Is Car Culture the Ultimate Act of Community in Crenshaw?”

  by Jackie Mansky

  Where Crenshaw and Leimert boulevards meet, the silvery glint of artist and sculptor Charles Dickson’s …

• Essay

  How I Learned to Blowdry My Hair at 40

  And Other Lessons from Growing Out My Locks in Middle Age

  by Nick Fuller Googins

  In March 2020, I stopped cutting my hair. Like many, I wasn’t about to risk a COVID infection for a trip to …

New at Zócalo

Essay

Are Venture Capitalists Silicon Valley’s Biggest Villains?

They Get Lauded for Funding Innovation—But What They Really Fund Is Exponential Growth That Lines Their Own Pockets

by Benjamin Shestakofsky

Will was a web designer living in Los Angeles and supporting his wife, an aspiring actress. He couldn’t shake the idea that he, too, should pursue his passion. So he started a side business on a new digital platform, AllDone (a pseudonym), which connected skilled service providers with customers. Will created a profile to offer guitar lessons, quickly landed a couple of students, and signed up for a subscription that allowed him to respond to potential clients for a flat fee of $20 per month.
  Will’s business grew, and he quit web design to teach full-time. A few months later, he got a call from a customer support agent at AllDone. She had bad news: The platform would no longer offer subscriptions. Will would now have to pay a fee to respond to each potential client …

Birthday

Zócalo Celebrates 20 Years of Connecting People to Ideas and Each Other

Sketchbook  Mashanda Lazarus

Prizes

Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize

Our Migrant Souls Is an Essential Exploration of ‘Latino’ Identity

Interview by Sarah Rothbard

Héctor Tobar is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.”
  Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.
  Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants …

• Facing Our Collective Wounds With Generous Hope

  by William Sturkey

• Fifty Years of Living with America’s Unexploded Bombs

  by Sera Koulabdara

• Misread, Illegible, Invisible: Searching for a Vocabulary for Tule Lake

  by Tamiko Nimura

Poetry

• Survivor’s Gift

  by Abu Bakr Sadiq

• Bildungsroman

  by Yvanna Vien Tica

• A Pill Bug Mutters Makeshift Myths

  by Tommy Vinh Bui

Connecting California Joe Mathews

• California’s Budget Deficit Is Not the Problem

  Don’t Worry About Balancing the Books. It’s Our Kafkaesque State Constitution That Needs Fixing
• Can the Real San Francisco Airport Please Stand Up?

  SFO and OAK Both Want to Claim the Bay Area City, but Neither Is Actually Located There
• Huell Howser Lives!

  One Chronicler of Our State Offers His Take on Another

Culture Class Jackie Mansky

• What the Wonkapocalypse Can Teach Us

  An Immersive Experience Gone Wrong Shows Us the Perennial Emptiness of Carefully Curated Escapes from Reality

• Cowboy Boots Were Made for Everyone

  For Over a Century and Half, the Footwear Has Carried the Story of a Nation

• Why We Hunger for the Holiday Special

  Every December, an Age-Old Format Warms the Winter Night

Takeaway

• Why Shouldn't Phillis Wheatley's Poems Show Up at an NFL Game?

  At Last Night’s Event—”Can a Football Stadium Be a Black History Museum?”—Panelists Argued to Democratize Culture

  by Jackie Mansky

  On the rarified second level of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, amid premium owner suites and premium beer sales, there’s an Angela Davis quote plastered on a wall.
  “Our histories never unfold in isolation,” reads the excerpt from the scholar and activist’s 2015 book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. “We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories …

Where I Go

• Where I Go

  Where I Go: L.A.'s Oldest Standing Black-Owned Bar

  I Didn’t Know How to Make a Cadillac Margarita. The Living Room Still Offered Me a Job—And a Community

  by Shivonne Peart

• Where I Go

  Where I Go: Redondo Beach Brings Me Back to Myself

  I’m the Keeper of My Family’s Memories. My Hometown Is Where I Uncover the Layers of Our Past

  by Jim Hinch

• Where I Go

  Where I Go: A Lifetime Spent Journaling

  As a Teen, It Saved My Sanity. Today, It Reminds Me to Pay Attention as Life Flows By

  by Katherine Hoffman

Glimpses

by Nina Berman and Micha Espinosa; photographs by Sabine Skiba

by Suzanne Joskow

by Laura Moran

In the Green Room

• Destination Crenshaw Senior Art and Exhibition Advisor V. Joy Simmons

  I Don’t Have a Favorite Child

• Architect Gabrielle Bullock

  I Wanted to Change How My People Lived

• Los Angeles City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson

  Los Angeles Communities Are Wealthy Communities

Inquiries